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This paper explores both the finding of raw amber, and the creation of sculptural works in this venerated material, in Italy, from the late-16th to the 18th centuries. Using new archival and archaeological evidence, it offers new interpretation and context for a number of amber objects in the V&A's collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the damage caused by the November 1966 flash flood in Florence, Italy. He focuses on the water and mud damage sustained by the archives of the National Library, which includes more than 500,000 books, 20,000 manuscripts and 3,500 pieces of incunabula. Efforts to mitigate the damage to the items in the National Library were made, such as the placement of absorbent paper between the pages of wet books and the transfer of the most valuable books and documents to monasteries for preservation and restoration.

The article focuses on the wealth of material on English history illustrating the foreign, and the domestic policy of England that are preserved in the archives of Venice, Italy. These records go back to the thirteenth century, though some have escaped the early conflagrations and carry the imagination even to the ninth century. The reports of the ambassadors of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, which are most interesting to the foreign students, are contained in two or three of the very extensive ranges of rooms that hold the entire collection.

It is informed that the Italian Government is now committed to make in demonstration of the leading position which Italians gained in the earliest stages of the development of American geography. The great need which the student now feels of further elucidation in respect to the career of Columbus is the recovery of the diplomatic correspondence of Spain and Portugal with the Papal Court, which led to the bull of demarcation in 1493. It has long been supposed that the archives of the Vatican would reveal something.

The article reports on a study on Italian state archives to be conducted by the Archivio di Stato di Prato, Medieval and Renaissance academics from Monash University and the Prato Consortium. Some of the subjects to be studied are the papers of Francesco Datini, the well-known merchant of Prato. It is noted that the materials to be studies may give light to cultural development in Renaissance Florence and Prato.