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The various practices and uses of photographs and their effects in the nineteenth century are more clearly reflected in Sicily than in other parts of Italy and the rest of Europe. Photographs and their appearance in both popular and scholarly print media gave Sicily widespread visibility. This paper considers photographs of Norman monuments in Palermo and Monreale made for diverse purposes: they provided documentation and inventory for preservation and restoration; they served as an experimental instrument for architectural analysis; they offered new methods for the then-new disciplines of art and architectural history; they were tourist souvenirs depicting romantically transfigured sceneries; and they even played an important role in formation and promotion of the Italian nation-state.

When Ulrich Middeldorf departed Florence in November 1935 to teach art history at the University of Chicago, he left behind at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz the ‘Photo collection – the special pride of our Institute’ in the structure that has characterised it up to the present day. Middeldorf was 25 when he first came to the Institute as a scholar. In the following years he turned the Photothekinto a modern research instrument, re-organising its classification system and its card indexes as the main finding aid. His contribution to the growth of the collection was enormous, not only thanks to his own donations, but also through the relationship he fostered with the main patron of the collection, Luigi Vittorio Fossati Bellani.