The presentation will cover the history and activities of Rai Teche, the department responsible for the preservation, cataloging, and enhancement of Rai’s audiovisual and documentary heritage. It will discuss Rai Libraries, their historical evolution, the main collections preserved, and their role as research and documentation centers for scholars, students, and professionals. Organizational changes that occurred in 2026 will also be presented, along with the activities related to the protection and management of the company’s cultural heritage. The presentation will delve into some documentary discoveries that emerged during the reorganization of the collections, highlighting how archives can offer new perspectives on the history of Italian radio and television. Finally, concrete examples of Rai’s heritage valorization will be illustrated through cultural projects, research activities, outreach initiatives, and collaborations for exhibitions and events.
Ginevra Rapex was born in Rome in 1978. She graduated in Classical Literature in 2003 from the University of RomaTre, and obtained a Master’s in Art and Culture Management from MART in Rovereto in collaboration with the Trento School of Management (TSM) in Trento in 2004. After an internship at the National Central Library of Rome in 2007, she earned a diploma in Library Science from La Sapienza University of Rome in 2009. Since 2013, she has worked at Rai’s Archives, initially in the Documentation sector and from 2024 at Rai’s Bibliomediateche in Rome. She currently works in the Mass Communications Library located at the production center on Via Teulada 66. In 2019, she represented the company at the 50th annual conference of IASA (International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives) in the Netherlands, focused on the preservation of audiovisual archives. In 2021, she published a biographical novel about her grandfather, a magistrate in Tripolitania and a judicial consul in Shanghai in the first half of the 20th century, with the publishing house Il Convivio.
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The birth of the Archives
The establishment of the Teche Department dates back to 1996, a decisive moment in the company’s history, as previously, the management and cataloging of everything produced or owned by RAI in various capacities were the responsibility of the television and radio production centers. These production structures, focused on directing all their efforts toward daily broadcasting, could only dedicate limited resources to the preservation and cataloging of historical material.
The idea of creating an archive center with the specific mission of archiving the company’s television, radio, paper, and other materials had actually emerged several times since the 1980s, but it was Barbara Scaramucci, the first director of RAI Teche, who succeeded in the endeavor in 1996. Assisted by the then Board of Directors chaired by Professor Roberto Zaccaria, a team of trusted managers, the Corporate Electronic Center in Turin, and the company’s documentation staff, she devised and implemented a project to catalog the company’s material using univocal criteria, involving the stored media and starting the digitization process. The activity involved television, radio, music, paper archives (library, sheet music and scores, scripts), and even the costume and stage equipment warehouse. The most significant result of this activity was the launch between 1999 and 2000 of the Multimedia Catalogue, a catalog that included all the company’s materials and provided, alongside the informational sheet, access to audiovisual multimedia content. Programmers and directors thus had an extraordinary ease in retrieving archival materials, even for reuse in new broadcasts. The current layout and graphics of the Multimedia Catalogue date back to 2013.
Regarding the paper archives (besides the collections of books and magazines, as we will see now, as well as the Radiocorriere, musical scores, etc.), a special mention goes to the collection of radio scripts, which boasts about 90,000 titles, some dating back to the Fascist period, an era when recordings were practically never made and which, for this reason, constitute one of the main sources for reconstructing programming from that time.
Currently, the Teche Directorate is organized internally into the following Structures: Support Digitization and Preservation, Digital Documentation and Bibliomediateques, Customer Service, Editorial Support, Management of Copyright and Related Rights, Rights Archive. The Support Digitization and Preservation unit handles the high-definition transfer of audiovisual holdings to achieve the digitization of the entire Rai heritage. The Documentation team is responsible for recovering all daily broadcasts, both television and radio, as well as all historical material, known as “historic,” a task that involves ensuring each documented resource is accompanied by a content analysis (including, among other things, the use of keywords based on the principle of nominalization), necessary for retrieving documents within the Multimedia Catalog. Nowadays, the major challenge in this sector is that they have started to use artificial intelligence, which will soon lead to new approaches and a possible streamlining of the processing of all material. Customer Service is the structure that interfaces between Rai and external entities such as organizations, foundations, institutions, as well as private individuals, who request copies of material primarily for non-profit and mainly cultural purposes. Editorial Support is Rai Teche’s production sector, which represents an increasingly growing channel, helping to enable public and free access to Rai’s heritage not only through the RaiPlay platform but also on the dedicated Rai Teche website https://www.teche.rai.it/. The area of Copyright and Related Rights Management, together with the Rights Archive, finally ensures the correct handling and dissemination, at the legislative level, of any audiovisual document.https://www.teche.rai.it/
The Rai Libraries
Rai Libraries constitute the main access point to the company’s cultural heritage. They are aimed at scholars, students, researchers, authors, and anyone interested in consulting Rai’s book and periodical collections, internal publications, and the Multimedia Catalog of the Archives. Through these resources, it is possible to trace the history of Italian radio and television and observe the country’s cultural and linguistic evolution.
Currently, two locations are open to the public: the “Dino Villani” Media Library in Turin, located at Via Verdi 31, and the Mass Communications Library in Via Teulada 66 in Rome. Access is by appointment, requested via email, with a division that designates the Turin Library for Northern Italy and the Rome Library for Central and Southern Italy.
The Paolo Giuntella Library
The Paolo Giuntella Library, currently temporarily closed, was established at the end of the 1940s at Rai’s headquarters on Via delle Botteghe Oscure as support for radio activities and, later, television. In 1952, it was moved to the Hotel de Russie on Via del Babuino, and in 1966 it found its definitive location in the new complex on Viale Mazzini.
Its central position within the building was not accidental: the library was conceived as one of the fundamental points of the company, symbolizing the cultural and informational role played by public radio and television.
The holdings include over 80,000 volumes and about 400 periodicals. The collections have always represented a valuable resource for Rai program production as well as for students and researchers. In addition to sectors such as communication, radio, television, cinema, theater, and journalism, the library possesses a rich selection of works dedicated to music, art, literature, history, politics, philosophy, and sociology. Some sections also contain rare and valuable old volumes.
An important part of the collections comes from the donation of Fulvio Palmieri, director of the second radio program in the 1950s. In the 1960s, the growth of the library’s collection was overseen by a committee composed of prominent Italian intellectuals and writers. The first printed catalog of the library also reflects the strong humanistic orientation of the collections.
Over the years, the library has continuously collaborated with other Rai structures, providing materials and documentation for broadcasts, cultural celebrations, historical anniversaries, and current affairs analyses. Additionally, it has been used as a setting for various television programs.
The Mass Communications Library
The Mass Communications Library was established in the first half of the 1960s within the Documentation and Studies Service. Initially housed at Viale Mazzini, it was later moved to Via Col di Lana and finally to its current location at Via Teulada.
The library holds approximately 13,000 specialized volumes in the field of mass communications and over 130 collections of Italian and foreign magazines related to the same field. Among these are important publications dedicated to semiotics, sociology, communication, journalism, and media.
A particularly significant presence is that of specialized journals in the law of information and telecommunications, documenting the evolution of Italian and European regulations and the provisions issued by the competent authorities.
In addition to books and magazines, the library preserves a vast amount of corporate documentation, which is virtually unique: conference proceedings, studies, research, materials produced by internal Rai services, historical projects such as Telescuola, and numerous theses by students who used the facility for their research.
The location features four computer stations that allow access to the Teche multimedia catalog, as well as spaces dedicated to consulting printed materials.
The Changes of 2026 In 2026
Rai libraries faced two significant transformations. The first was the adoption of a new management system, transitioning from the Aleph 500 platform to Sebina software, an operation that required the transfer and verification of about 80,000 bibliographic records, involving intensive data control work.
The second innovation was the temporary closure of the Paolo Giuntella Library and the subsequent transfer of its collections. This process provided an opportunity to deepen knowledge of the preserved heritage and to reflect on the institution’s history. Following the closure of Viale Mazzini, staff was transferred to the Communications Library of Massa, which today is the main reference point in Rome, along with the Mediateca of Turin.
Rare Materials and the Discovery of the 1940 EIAR
Referendum During the moving operations, rare materials of great historical interest emerged, including some internal Rai publications and the “Quaderni de la nostra Rai,” containing scripts and photographs of famous television productions.
Among the documents found is a study dedicated to the 1940 EIAR Referendum. The investigation gathered the opinions of radio listeners, invited to express preferences and suggestions about the programs and lessons broadcast via radio.
The analysis divided the audience by profession, age, listening times, and cultural interests, considering various genres such as music, theater, information, sports, education, foreign languages, and religious broadcasts. This demonstrates the desire to build programming attentive to the needs of different social groups.
The document reveals that radio was already a fundamental tool for education and the dissemination of culture, foreshadowing the role that television would later assume. The statistics and histograms contained in the study also provide a valuable testimony of Italian society of that era, its habits, interests, and the historical context in which it lived.
The Work of Cultural Transmission and the Teche (Archives)
During my personal journey within the Rai Archives, which began in 2013, I had the opportunity to engage in various types of work and to be involved in unexpected documentary discoveries. In this regard, in the documentation sector, in addition to working on programs almost entirely radio-based, I had the chance to participate in building a website, whose page, titled “MitoRai,” is accessible at https://www.teche.rai.it/mitorai/. The richness of themes related to classicism within the audiovisual heritage has been impressive, and in this sense, we hope that the range of contributions presented on the site can stimulate curiosity and research among the general public, especially on topics related to classical culture.
Music is also an immense Rai heritage. Without dwelling on the activities of the great symphony orchestras that in the past marked high-level lyric and concert seasons, both nationally and internationally—such as the orchestras of Naples, Rome, and Turin—and the vast collection of scores, preserved in paper form today in Turin but partly included in the Multimedia Catalog, classical music on radio was an essential component of programming in the twentieth century. During the recovery of the so-called historical recordings, as I already mentioned, many hours of musical performances were digitized, often without sufficiently detailed documentation. This led to a fascinating investigative work: retrieving basic information about performers and interpreters and utilizing all available details (found in small recording cards, which were stored together with the recording media, then digitized into PDFs and attached to the sound documents). This was done to cross-reference not only with the programming listed in Radiocorriere but also with concert programs, in order to identify the titles of all performed compositions, the context of the performances, and their broadcast dates (which often did not coincide with the recording dates). Naturally, concert programs like Radiocorriere, related to various Rai concert seasons, are also available in digital form within the Multimedia Catalog databases.
Libraries, as well as all other structures within the Archives and Rai in general, participate synergistically in the collection of exceptional materials to create exhibitions and installations. In 2024, I participated in the exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of radio and the 70th anniversary of television, held at the MAXXI in Rome. In addition to numerous brochures and archival materials available at our Libraries, one of the most personally exciting research experiences was at the archive of the Florence regional office, mentioned in the introduction, which contains an extraordinary wealth of documents: scripts, sometimes autographed, of dramas and radio dramas, correspondence between the editorial offices and external collaborators, and the magazines L’Approdo and Il Terzo Programma (connected to their respective radio broadcasts). Without dwelling too much on the letters and manuscripts that include signatures of figures such as Raffaele La Capria, Eduardo De Filippo, Ennio Flaiano, Natalino Sapegno, and countless other cultural personalities of the time…
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