Historical Exhibition
Istat. 90 years connected with the Country
Rome, 20 October – 14 February 2017
h. 9.30 – 19.00
Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele II|Vittoriano
Zanardelli Hall
Free Entrance
In 2016 Istat celebrates the 90th anniversary of its foundation. In these years the Institute has grown, and changed with the country, reflecting its transformations and heterogeneity. A long history of commitment and innovation to produce statistical information and high-quality analyses and estimates, in full independence and on the basis of strict ethical and professional principles.
The historical exhibition “90 years connected with the country” is one of the major events dedicated to the celebrations of the 90th anniversary of Istat’s founding.
The exhibition, held on two floors, highlights how Istat’s life and that of the country have been closely connected with each other since 1926, through documentary material coming from Istat’s historical Archive and the Central State Archive: photographs, multimedia documents, video from the Istituto Luce and RAI
(Italian State Television) archives, documentaries, infographics and visualizations.
The exhibition opens with a video that sums up the ninety years of Istat’s history: from its first President, Corrado Gini, whose name is linked to the coefficient to measure income inequality, to Giorgio Alleva currently in office.
On the first floor of Zanardelli Hall, visitors can follow the path “Istat’s history”: archival materials illustrate the most salient events of the Institute’s life as well as methodological and technological innovations and changes that characterized the censuses, surveys and data collection, processing and dissemination over time.
The section also hosts a collection of valuable volumes (Atlases and Statistical Yearbooks) from the years immediately following the founding of Istat, and documents coming from Istat’s historical Archive, the Central State Archive and the University of Rome, La Sapienza. A few rare machines are also exposed, like comptometers, sorters and punching machines, used for statistical production during the pre-computer age.
At the end of this path, a video shows the various stages of a statistical survey.
Along the second itinerary of the exhibition – Story of the Country – large panels with context photos, videos, graphics and infographics reconstruct the most significant moments of the last 90 years of Italy’s history through six different generations. From the Reconstruction generation of the second postwar period, through the Commitment generation, protagonist of the great battles and cultural transformations of the 70s, and the Identity one, so called for the strong sense of political allegiance underlying the choices of the youth in those years, right to the Transition generation that marked the passage between the two centuries.
The itinerary ends with the last two generations, that of the Millennium and that of the Networks. If the former is the Euro and European citizenship generation, the latter is made up of those who were born and raised in the Internet age, the so-called digital natives.
Visitors are guided through this section by four women born in different historical periods: Maria, Anna, Francesca and Giulia; a plot device to show how statistics is able to tell stories and describe paths with which individuals may identify themselves.
90 years of official statistics in Italy, 90 years of our history. To know us better.