FLORENCE'S DAUGHTERS AT THE INNOCENTI: Restoration 2025 - 'Little Meteors'

The Innocenti Institute's Historical Archive, Ph. Marco Badiani, 2025

Little Meteors: The Girls

Restoring Tokens at the Innocenti Institute

By Linda Falcone

This article was first published in Restoration Conversations

Magazine Issue 7, Spring 2025

The Innocenti Hospital’s historical archive comprises more than 13,000 documents and objects from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, including ‘tokens’ that parents left with their foundling children, as proof of identity. Located in the ancient refectory, the archive hosts one of the world’s most unique archival collections, that of the city’s foundling children, most of whom were girls. As an update on the project ‘Florence’s Daughters at the Innocenti’, sponsored by donors Connie and Doug Clark and Margie MacKinnon and Wayne McArdle, Restoration Conversations had a dual interview on site, with two members of the all-woman project team Antonella Schena, Head of Archives and Museum/ Cultural Activities and services, and the Innocenti Institute’s head archivist Lucia Ricciardi.

Antonella Schena: ‘Florence’s Daughters’ is a pilot project, because we are striving to develop a lasting method, in order to research, transcribe, restore and digitise the entire exhibitable collection, starting with 100 tokens belonging to little girls. The project is experimental, in the sense that we’ve never worked with the 1900s collection in this way before. For certain elements,we know more about the 1400s, than we do about the 1900s! The documents and interviews linked to the 100 tokens selected were filled out by physicians, from 1901 onwards. Inclusion of the mother’s data was considered mandatory, while the father’s was optional. These documents were created so that the Innocenti Institute could understand whether or not a foundling’s mother had suffered from venereal diseases, like syphilis, or had other relevant health problems.

Studying historical archives, Instituto degli Innocenti, Ph. Marco Badiani, 2025

Our tokens from the 1800s are stored in special boxes, but in this case, and more specifically

from the 1890s onwards, we are working with folders and files that are stapled together, which always represents a challenge. Most of the paper documents are not spotted or marred, but some have circumscribed damage, often derived from the simple fact that they are stored standing upright, and not lying flat, which can cause crinkling over time.

Several conservation issues are being evaluated, and perhaps they will need to be stored differently, with special paper and proper separators, or even made-to-measure boxes. These objects’ digitalisation will reduce the need to handle them, if not for exhibition purposes.

Lucia Ricciardi: I’m happy to report, I found documents for a baby called Calliope (see back cover) among the tokens selected, and thought it would be nice to tell you about her, considering that this project stems from the Innocenti’s partnership with the Calliope Arts Foundation. She is the project’s namesake child! We have an annotation about her father and know he was a 25-year-old farmer. Her mother, aged 23, is described as follows: ‘Poor. She attends to rural tasks’. Both parents were from the Mugello area, where Calliope was born and reportedly baptised. The child was admitted on 13 February 1901, when she was ten days old. Baby Calliope’s token is a complex one, because it’s made of several different items. The first, called a ‘breve’, is a miniature pin cushion-like object, once used for devotional purposes. It likely contains prayers or other kinds of texts, but they’ve never been opened.

These messages were tucked inside the object, and sewn up tight before being further sealed with trimming. They constitute the token’s secret, which we respect. Through restoration, will we be able to look inside one or two, using radiographic techniques? That remains a question for the superintendency and the restoration team. To understand the complexity of a restoration like this one, where all one hundred tokens are completely unique and comprised of multiple materials, it’s important to note that two superintendent offices are in charge of planning and monitoring the restoration, together with project conservators. The first superintendency is archival and the second safeguards artistic heritage. In the case of Baby Calliope’s token, it involves fabric restoration, because of its pink bow threaded through two Italian coins with holes in the middle, one of which is cut. A metals restorer will be involved as well. In this time period, each baby had eight to ten sheets attached to their case – and the paper has its own set of needs from a restoration point of view.”

Antonella: The project is focused on the Innocenti’s girls and its initial phase has involved the census of our early twentieth-century tokens, dating from 1900 to 1924. We are choosing from an initial pool of 300 cases, whose files containboth physical tokens and paper documentation.The tokens themselves are not dissimilar fromthose in our nineteenth-century collection. Yet, from the turn of the century onwards, as official paperwork became a mandatory condition determining the Institute’s acceptance of children, the presence of tokens diminished considerably.

After the anonymous abandonment of children became illegal in 1875, and the Innocenti’s grated ‘foundling’s window’ closed forever, parents no longer needed a severed coin or a bauble cut in half, as a means of reclaiming their child. When tokens stopped being considered a child’s identity card, they became – as the name itself suggests – a sign of their mother’s affection or symbolic protection. Lucia: Many early twentieth-century parents who

brought their children to the Innocenti had no idea that foundling tokens were no longer ‘necessary’. Perhaps they were told by their female elders about age-old traditions linked to turning one’s children over to the Institute’s care.

During the first two decades of the 1900s, it accepted roughly 700 children per year, 300 of which arrived with tokens, called segnali, or ‘signs’ in Italian. Among the 100 tokens chosen, those needing restoration or conservation will be subject to treatment. The choice of which ones to restore depends on several factors; some are chosen for their aesthetic quality, and others are selected for the story they tell. Because the project involves a small-scale exhibition at our museum, starting 5 November 2025, we have looked for tokens with a certain degree of narrative power. We’d also like to contextualise these tokens, and see what story they collectively tell, as a reflection of their historical period.

Lucia: A project like this one gives these little girls relevance. They are given their own place

in history, however brief. Wouldn’t it be nice, if each of us had our own physical page in history? These girls sometimes lived no more than a few days or even hours; they were meteors. But this project affords them attention, salvaging them from oblivion, and the gesture seems to stop – even for a moment – the mad rush in which we find ourselves, as members of the modern world. If children, in general, had few rights at that time, these children had even fewer. So, the project enables them to emerge. It is about uncovering a still hidden side of social history.

For several months, while working on the project’s archival phase, we would pore over the archives and talk to each other in hushed voices. The whispering was a form of respect, I think. Like the project’s sponsors, we are very keen on giving solidity to these girls’ stories – as we raise awareness about the small but significant ‘body of evidence’ that constitutes their life story. Something similar was done with soldiers from World War I, so that they would not remain a mere list of names, and be remembered as people, not numbers. I feel it is my duty to give these girls the story to which they have a right. History with a capital ‘h’ is made of many small stories, such as theirs.

Detail, Historical Archives at the Instituto degli Innocenti, Ph. Marco Badiani, 2025

Antonella: 1900 to 1920 was a time of great change, as far as social services for women are

concerned, albeit policies were usually formed from the child’s perspective, not necessarily the woman’s. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Innocenti started studying solutions to

keep mothers and babies together, by providing them with external services, like childcare. As physicians began to see maternal breast milk as the primary safeguard against infant mortality, national policies were rolled out throughout Italy, to make breast-feeding by mothers mandatory for the first few months of a child’s life.

The Innocenti Institute hosted two of the first-ever conferences on this topic. Wet-nurses became a thing of the past, even if artificial milk available at the time – usually goat milk – could offer no real guarantees of an infant’s survival. Our history is comprised of many small stories that are difficult to reconstruct. For ‘Florence’s Daughters’, we are not talking about complete histories or literary narratives. We have sparse information, yet it was collected and it has been preserved. Without this archive, we would know nothing of them. It still fills me with wonder to see how the Institute has managed to maintain these ties through time, unlike other historic foundling hospitals of its kind. In many ways, we are looking at the history of the poor, the history of social welfare – an important story to reconstruct and,

ultimately, to understand.

LINDA FALCONE