Playbills Collection by Agostino Morani
The collection of playbills gathered by Agostino Morani was donated by his son Aldo at the University Library in 1978 and consists of 1,045 documents set on cardboard and collected in 7 ring binders, of which 1 on the Fraschini Theatre, 5 at the Teatro Guidi, 1 in various theaters of the city of Pavia, almost all from the period between 1880 and 1925.
The playbills refer to plays, prose or opera works, but there are also concerts, vocal and instrumental academies, fencing essays, magic and acrobatics, public dances and dances of Carnival and, finally, a few program of entire seasons of opera or prose.
These documents, as well as witness the artistic and musical activities of the city of Pavia, are a good source of information on local history, because we talk about the daily life of the city, its culture and leisure opportunities and people involved variously in multiple activities of the theaters of Pavia.
The collection is described in relation to the playbills of the theater Fraschini, the contribution to the press “Vedere per credere, credere per vedere, pagare per entrare”: le locandine del Fraschini nella collezione Morani della Biblioteca Universitaria di Pavia by Maria Ghisella Pieve, Giuliana Sacchi, Como, New Press, 1996, pp. 338-375, (excerpt from “Bollettino della Società Pavese di Storia Patria”, 1996).
The collection is the subject of a digitization project which involved playbills of the Fraschini theater and those of various theaters (as of July 2014).