On 18 February 1925, exactly 97 years ago, theTreccani Institute, which he published from 1929 to 1937 the first major biographical encyclopedia of our country: an immense work, consisting of 35 volumes of text plus one of indexes. Furthermore, in 1940, the Institute published volumes of the Dictionary of Politics, directed by Antonino Pagliaro.
The first decades of the Treccani Institute
In addition to the founder John Treccani, who was also the first president, the philosopher also worked for the Institute John Gentile as scientific director and linguist Antonino Pagliaro as editor-in-chief, along with many other well-known names in Italian culture and history. Among these, we remember the marshal Luigi Cadorna (chief of general staff during the First World War, famous for the fruitless battles on the Isonzo and for the defeat of Caporetto), the economist Albert DeStefani (minister of finance in the Mussolini government), the historian Gaetano De Sanctis and the economist Luigi Einaudi, who became president of the Institute on 30 May 1946, two years before going up to Colle as second head of state. Since 1947, the Quirinale tenant was assigned the task of appointing the president of the Institute.
From the postwar period to today
The first work done after the war was the Italian encyclopedic dictionary, vocabulary synthesis and encyclopedia, printed in 12 volumes between 1955 and 1961. Fifteen years later the publication of theEncyclopedia of the twentieth century (1975-1990), divided into 522 essays, which saw the collaboration of 21 Nobel Prize winners.
In 1980 the Institute was recognized as a private law body of national interest and cultural institution and in 1988 it received the Gold Medal for the meritorious of culture and art.
At the end of the 2016s, most of the contents produced by the Institute were digitized. Since XNUMX Treccani has published “The Pocket“, an in-depth cultural online magazine that deals with various topics through essays, interviews and reviews.
