(Paolo Locatelli, Giosuè Berbenni)

All the churches of the Province of Bergamo were considered (parish, secondary, sanctuaries, oratories, both public and private chapels, both catholic and protestant ones) and all the public buildings containing a pipe-organ. The churches considered are more than 1650; 1594 of them belong to the Diocese of Bergamo.

(Stefano Bertuletti, Giuliano Todeschini, Luigi Panzeri, Fabrizio Vanoncini, Giosuè Berbenni)

All the pipe-organs existing in the Province of Bergamo (2.723 km² with more than 900.000 inhabitants) and in the Diocese of Bergamo were mapped. The parishes present in the region of the Province of Bergamo are 430; among them 388 belong to the Diocese of Bergamo, 18 to the Diocese of Cremona, 12 to the Diocese of Brescia, 12 to the Diocese of Milano. Because of historical reasons, also some instruments, belonging to the Province of Bergamo till some years ago, now belonging to the Province of Lecco, were taken into consideration.

Essential data and dating:  Till now, 539 pipe-organs were found: 529 are owned by ecclesiatics and 10 are not (they are public or private). This is the distribution of the instruments on the historical periods: 1 is a sixteenth century organ, 8 are seventeenth century, 54 are eigthteenth, 340 are nineteenth, 131 are twentieth; 5 instruments remain undated.

State of conservation:  the majority of the instruments has a pretty good status. A few tens of them lie abandoned. Since 1980 to 2001 147 restorations had been made in the Province of Bergamo.

Survey on single instruments:  a descriptive survey began being structured on two different levels: "shallow" and "deep". The former is a general description of the instrument: location in the building, dimensions, phonic disposition, number of keyboards, the pedalboard compass, kind of the layout. In the "deep" level of the survey a more detailed sheet was defined (it was inspired to the ministerial sheet); it is divided into 14 sections related to: building, case and "cantoria", façades, pipes, keyboard, pedalboard, stops, tools, bellows, mechanical structure, transmissions, windchests, tuning and bibliography.

(Giosuè Berbenni)

First of all a preliminary survey war carried out in the most important archives where there were documents concerning pipe-organs: State Archives, archives of the diocese of Bergamo, Ancient Organs Private Archives of "Italia Nostra" section of Bergamo, private Archives of the Collegiata Prepositurale church of Treviglio, the Professor Locatelli and Professor Berbenni's private archives.

Then some specific investigations were carried into effect: in the State Archives about the Serassi family (about period ranging from 1727 to 1850); in the Historical Archives of the Trade Chamber about nineteenth century organ factories and in the diocesan Archives of Bergamo, with the register of the pastoral visitations of the bishop Pierluigi Speranza (1854-1879) and of the bishop Giacomo Maria Radini Tedeschi (1905-1914). Finally there is a systematic survey of the diocesan Archives of Bergamo from the year 1920 to 1990.

Moreover some archival and documental information was gathered. It is related to the instruments of the "collegiata" church of Treviglio (from 1600 to 1980), to the churches of the parish of "Romano di Lombardia" (517-2002), and to Gandino (from the eigthteenth to the twentieth century).

(project by Gianfranco Berbenni; development by Ettore Erri)

It is a tool for consultation and studying able to:

 Identify each pipe-organ and exactly define the location on the national area.
 Describe the instrument in the specific historical-artistical and topographical-architectural context, its component and its phonic and functional features.
 List the morphological-dimensional features of the components.
 Allow the conducted reading of the descriptive data of the instruments and their use to make research (bibliography included).
 Include the images of the layout and of internal structural elements.

The prototype of the Database (a Microsoft Access application) comprises about 100 tables, 100 queries, 120 forms (sizing about 4MegaBytes without data); it is bundled with a technical manual.

(Marco Guerinoni)

The work was divided into several phases:

 1) Transcription of the autographical letters.
 2) Identification of the key words for the reasoned indexing of the correspondence.
 3) Identification of specific organ, musical, economical, ecclesiastical, historical, social topics to be dealt with in further researches.

(Pier Maria Soglian)

This survey (also developed by visiting the libraries and the archives of Bergamo, Como, Crema, Genova, Lodi, Milano, Parma, Piacenza, Roma, Sondrio, Torino, Trento, Venezia and Verona) aims to find out, by a bibliographical-documental research, the "subjects" involved in the diffusion of the serassian model. This is required by the expected critical edition of the Serassi's Correspondence existing in the Civic Library of Bergamo; this correspondence was transcripted by this Operational Unit (Marco Guerinoni).

(Marco Ruggeri)

They are more than a thousand handwritten and printed pages existing in the archives of the basilica of "S.Maria in Campagna" in Piacenza. The organ activity of Padre Davide from Bergamo directly influenced not only the organ-building art in Bergamo, but also in the Lombardia of the nineteenth century.

(Marco Fratti)

5 CDs were filled with digital photos (low, medium and high resolution) of the "segnature" (marks/signatures) visible on the foot and body plates of the metal and wooden pipes, and on the mechanical components (winchests, table of mechanisms, keyboards, etc.) of six historical pipe-organs, sampled among all the organs: three eigthteenth century and three nineteenth century organs belonging to the Serassi, Bossi and Locatelli organ builders.

(Marino Anesa)

The archives of Gandino are the most important archives existing in a town of the province of Bergamo. A detailed work was performed in this "localized historical memory". Among the goals:

• the classification of the musical fund
• the transcription of the paper-pages of the nineteenth century related to:
  1. the organs of the Basilica and of the minor churches;
  2. the organists (from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century);
  3. the so called "contrappunti";
  4. the philarmonic society.

(Gianpietro Turani)

The goal of the project is to share the knowledge of the pipe-organ richness of Bergamo via Internet. The web pages, hosted by the technical infrastructure of the Province of Bergamo, show a part of the data comprised in the pipe-organ Data Base, mainly the most meaningful descriptions and technical information about organs, photographic images and related bibliography.

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