The Documentation Centre of the National Automobile Museum of Torino has a Library (books and reviews) and an Archive, which are amongst the most important European collections about the automobile History. Core of the Museum, the Documentation Centre began its activity at the beginning of the Sixties, short after the opening of the Museum in the Corso Unità d’Italia premises.
The Library has ca 8,000 volumes, some of them very rare and many owned exclusively, about the history of locomotion, the automakers from all over the world, the auto races since the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the evolution of the technics, and also catalogues, yearbooks, and most interesting publications. There is also a precious collection of ancient books, twenty of them date back to the Sixteenth Century (“cinquecentine”).
In the Library are available also 700 reviews, Italian and Foreign ones, all of them centred on the automobile, and some very precious.
22,000 documentary units belong to the Archive, divided into the six sections (Automakers, Races, Biographies, Technics, Bodymakers, Automobilia) of the Fondi Storici, with many original documents and photographs. To these Funds, the ones collected by Carlo Biscaretti and Giovanni Canestrini, many others have added, as a result of donations in the last twenty years: Fondi Cappa, Bernabò, Boneschi, Mirabile, Beretta, Contemporaneo, Bertazzini, Langmann, Savonuzzi. 15,000 photographs are already available online, out of the 25,000 owned.
