Turin 1911: The World’s Fair in Italy is the first digital project devoted to the only universal exposition ever held in Italy. Though World’s fairs were among the West’s largest mass-attended events, they were also ephemeral occurrences designed to exhibit, rather than preserve, the changing world of modernity. Turin 1911 was no exception. Once the Fair was dismantled, its artifacts were scattered among institutional archives and private collectors, thus failing to be studied in a systematic manner.

Turin 1911: The World’s Fair in Italy collects a wide array of Exposition artifacts and organizes them in an analytical database in order to investigate the Fair’s technologies of representation. The goal of this project is twofold: a) to preserve an endangered cultural patrimony and b) to promote understanding of the ways in which this fair (and World’s Fairs in general) conveyed specific cultural and ideological messages.