Venturi Music Collection
The Venturi Music Collection (in Italian, Fondo musicale Venturi, or Fondo Venturi) is a collection of musical documents housed at the Public Library in Montecatini Terme, Italy. It conserves many handwritten copies by composers who were active in the second half of the 1700s; for example, there are autographs, which are one of a kind, of composers from the Pistoia and Florence area. History The Collection began with the private collection of the Sermolli family, a Tuscan nobile family that had bought musical manuscripts until the 1700s. In 1933, Antonio Venturi (1905-1981), teacher at Montecatini High School, musician, and collectionist, convinced Alessandro Pichi-Sermolli, who was on the verge of selling all of his belongings, to entrust him with the management of the musical documents. Venturi united the Sermolli manuscripts with his own personal paper collection, bought from ragmen, originating from the Distanti Academy, running in Pistoia and Gavinana (San Marcello Pistoiese). For fifty years, Venturi was the only curator of the entire collection, to which over time he added many materials, even some of which are multimedia. Aware that the musical manuscripts represent the most precious items of his collection, in 1958, he allowed an inventory to be completed by