Girls in the Innocenti Archive: 1900 – 1921

Girls in the Innocenti Archive: 1900-1921 is a project conceived and executed by the Istituto degli Innocenti, in collaboration with Calliope Arts Foundation, aimed at protecting and showcasing the identity tokens that belonged to the girls taken in by the Hospital during the early decades of the twentieth century, objects that the Nocentine (the institution’s young residents) were wearing when they arrived at the Institute.

During the centuries of anonymous abandonment, these items represented, for the girls and boys taken in, the only tangible proof of their origins. It served as an identity token of sorts necessary for possible recognition by their parents in the event they wished to reclaim their children. For this reason, they were often twin objects or broken in half, so they could be easily matched with the halves kept by the families: coins and medals, votive objects – such as rosaries, brevi, medallions, and crosses – or everyday items, like jewellery, buttons, and ribbons. In the nineteenth century, even watch keys, fragments of photographs, glass lenses, or walnut shells were given.

The project, launched in October 2024, has led to the restoration, conservation, study, and digitisationof 120 tokens and related documents preserved in the Institution’s Historical Archive. These items belonged to the girls admitted during the first two decades of the last century – a period that has remained scantly explored but deserves to be rediscovered through these ‘small meteors’, delicate traces of forgotten lives that still have the power to speak to the present.

Restoration and digitisation have made it possible to preserve the integrity of these archival treasures and make them accessible online as well, through the Historical Archive’s Inventory and the Institute's Digital showcase. This unique and invaluable heritage restores visibility to the stories of the girls taken in at the beginning of the twentieth century, offering the public an opportunity to reflect on the condition of women and the value of memory as a tool for knowledge and the protection of human rights.

The project was made possible through the generous support of Calliope Arts Foundation, an organisation dedicated to promoting art, literature, and social history from a female perspective, and thanks to donors Margie MacKinnon and Wayne McArdle, Connie and Doug Clark. It forms part of the Institute’s ongoing research and heritage popularisation activities. The Institute’s Historical Archive preserves more than 13,000 archival units and around 40,000 identifying tokens, one of the largest collections of its kind in the world.

Girls in the Innocenti Archive: 1900-1921 concluded its first phase – dedicated to the study and preservation of the tokens – with the creation of an exhibition and a bilingual (Italian–English) publication of the same name that document the research and conservation processes the project involved, offering insight into the condition of women in welfare institutions of the twentieth century from a Florentine perspective.