GLAM/Newsletter/October 2025/Contents/Italy report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue X, October 2025

Italy report

Open culture on stage

Opera and open access: Teatro Regio di Torino joins the GLAM 2025 program

Among the institutions awarded in the 2025 GLAM call — funded by Wikimedia Italia in collaboration with ICOM Italia and Creative Commons Italia — is the Teatro Regio di Torino, one of Italy’s major opera foundations.

Marking the 50th anniversary of its reopening (1973–2023), the Teatro Regio launched a project to digitize, catalogue and share online hundreds of original stage and costume designs created between 1969 and 2019. These high-quality scans, now freely available on Wikimedia Commons, document the theatre’s visual and creative history and are linked to detailed catalogue records hosted on the theatre’s archival portal.

As part of the project, a Wiki-Story video was produced to give a virtual tour through the archives, while on 28 October Wikimedia Italia and the Teatro Regio organized an edit-a-thon dedicated to musical theatre. The event led to 6 new articles, 82 improved ones, and nearly 500 edits overall, with 2,000 digitized sketches already online and reused across 14 language editions of Wikimedia projects.

Digital roots: Wikimedia Italia at “Genealogy in the Third Millennium”

On 21 October 2025, Wikimedia Italia took part in La genealogia del III millennio: sfide, strumenti e nuove risorse del genealogista moderno (“Genealogy in the Third Millennium: challenges, tools and new resources for the modern genealogist”), an event organized by the Italian Library Association (AIB) at the Biblioteca Trivulziana, Castello Sforzesco in Milan.

The conference explored the evolution of genealogy and family history research, focusing on archival sources, digital innovation and open resources. Wikimedia Italia contributed with a presentation titled Radici digitali: costruire genealogie con dati aperti e strumenti Wikimedia (“Digital roots: building genealogies with open data and Wikimedia tools”).

The talk introduced Wikidata and linked open data as resources to connect genealogical information from diverse archives, demonstrating how Wikimedia platforms can expand access to family history and heritage data within the semantic web. The event gathered librarians, archivists and researchers, combining traditional archival methods with new digital approaches to genealogy.

Wikimedia Italia at GLAM Wiki 2025 in Lisbon

Iolanda Pensa, national GLAM coordinator, and Marco Chemello, GLAM staff member at Wikimedia Italia, took part in the GLAM Wiki Conference 2025 in Lisbon, dedicated to the theme Resilience: shaping the future through openness and community.

Iolanda Pensa joined the roundtable 100,000 Open Cultural Institutions, discussing how Wikimedia affiliates, ICOM and Creative Commons can engage cultural institutions worldwide in adopting open access, presenting the Italian and Argentinian case studies of the “Empowering GLAMs” project.

Marco Chemello presented the lighting talk From Closed Vault to Open Commons, the experience of the Museo Egizio of Turin — one of the world’s leading Egyptology museums and the first major Italian museum to adopt an open-access policy for its collection, in partnership with Wikimedia Italia and Creative Commons Italia.

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