Il collezionista di guerre future. Un percorso nelle collezioni di Diego de Henriquez presso i Civici musei di Trieste

In a few unpublished projects and notes written between the 1950s and the early 1970s Diego de Henriquez, Italian ex-soldier and passionate collector, developed his reflections and designs for a “war museum for peace”, which he planned to establish in Trieste. These papers represent a rich and yet unexplored material and are today at the Civico museo di guerra per la pace “Diego de Henriquez” of the City of Trieste, along with de Henriquez’s notable private collection of armaments, military tools and technologies, documents and books pertinent to the theme of war throughout history. This essay dwells on de Henriquez’s manuscripts, devoting specific attention to the popularization and edu- cational purposes he foresaw for future exhibitions, and the role played by literary and visual works of fiction in his programmes, as well as in his library and collection of ob- jects and works of art. Planning to devote the closing section of his war museum to future conflicts as imagined by writers and illustrators, in 1957 de Henriquez bought fifteen original sketches made by Albert Robida for Pierre Giffard’s feuilleton La guerre infer- nale (1908) from a bookstand in Rome. This essay, enhancing the presence of these rare materials in Trieste, and accompanied by the publication of two of Robida’s sketches, of- fers some remarks on the representation of war violence in early-contemporary imagery and on the re-use of Robida’s work in de Henriquez’s programme.