Computerize the access keys of theArchive of Umberto Nobile kept at the Historical Museum of the Air Force of Vigna di Valle. From today it will be possible, in real time, to carry out searches within the archival complex. This is the first result of the enhancement and fruition project that the National Research Council he is conducting on the cards of General Umberto Nobile. The activity falls under Polar Memory, a larger project, which involves the enhancement of polar scientific sources conducted in collaboration with the Department of history, cultural heritage, education and society of theTor Vergata University of Rome. Umberto Nobile's Archive, or rather a part of it, is composed of documentation, objects, memorabilia and photographs produced and collected by the General.
Documentary material was donated to the Historical Museum on several occasions starting from the late XNUMXs; the donation was wanted by the daughter Maria Nobile Schettino and by the widow of General Gertrude Nobile Stolp who took care of the first arrangement of the cards.
The purpose of the donation was "to pass on to future generations documents, memorabilia, which constituted a testimony of a uniqueness in the history of flying in Italy".
The cards, which overall embrace a chronological span from the late nineteenth century to the eighties of the last century, testify to all the activities carried out by the General, in particular those related to the explorations carried out with the airship "NORGE" (1926) which flew the North Pole, and with the "ITALY" airship (1928), a real flying laboratory.
No less important are the information inferable from the documents that testify to the activities carried out in Russia in the XNUMXs. The archival site is operational thanks to the Agreement of technical-scientific collaboration, which also had the placet of the Defense General Staff, signed by Maurizio Vitale of the General Services Office of the National Research Council, which includes the skills of archival type and related to document management, and by Colonel Giuseppe Lauriola of the AM Historiographic and Sports Center (CSSAM) in which the Museum is located. The agreement provides for the inventory, never carried out, of the documentation donated by the Nobile family to the Air Force together with the full digitalization. Scientific responsible for the agreement is Alessia Glielmi, CNR archivist and archives professor at the University of Rome 'Tor Vergata'. Marta Carnevali and Jessica Rosignoli, graduating in history and document sciences belonging to the Roman university, collaborate, taking care of the filing of the documentation.
The medium-term result of the project, put into practice through the use of cutting-edge technologies for the enhancement and use of cultural heritage, will be the inventory of this partition of the General Nobile's cards and digitization. The final - more ambitious - objective is the virtual reconstruction of the General's entire archive which is currently located in three different locations. To this end, an agreement was stipulated, again by the CNR, with the Municipality of Lauro (AV), where another substantial part of the Nobile archive is kept, and the Municipality of Eboli (SA) which preserves the documents relating to family history and various personal and family memories.