XX century Italian Handwriting 1.0

The model was created as part of a project initiated by the library of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan to improve accessibility to the documents contained in the archives of its Special Collections. The model includes documents extracted from archival fonds created by five different 20th-century personalities: Aristide Calderini (archaeologist and epigrapher), Roberto Busa (linguist and computer scientist), Giampiero Neri, Pasquale Maffeo, and Sandro Sinigaglia (poets and writers). These five handwritings, chronologically homogeneous, exhibit significant variability in terms of graphic style: regular, structured and looped (Neri, Calderini), large and italic (Busa, Maffeo), small in size with frequent variations in shape (Sinigaglia). From the perspective of languages and vocabulary, Italian predominates with a medium-high register, supplemented with Latin (from classical and ecclesiastical sources) and occasional insertions of specialized terms in English, German, and French. The project includes periodic updates of the model to incorporate writings from other 20th-century archives held at the university. Trained by Matteo Ruggeri with the contribution of Lorenzo Babini (UCSC-Milan-Library)