How did the Project develop? This is what Prof. Sandra Pietrini says

The idea of creating a database focused on the iconography inspired by the classics and their adaptations first emerged in 2010. After several years of collaboration on a theatrical visual database at the University of Florence, Dionysos, and the end of the project in 2006, I felt the need for a new collective initiative to be passed down to future generations. Writing books is a fulfilling activity, though often a solitary one, foreign to the dynamics of teamwork. Thus a new challenge emerged: to create a more specific iconographic archive, centered on visual representations of classic works. The development of a customized digital database was entrusted to the university technician Stefano Bernardini, who was the first to believe in the project and provided us with a search interface based on the fields and categories we had envisioned. I still remember the first mock-up I drew by hand and scanned as an initial draft for the graphical interface - so much work, so many steps and achievements yet to come. The project became more clearly defined over the following years, through ongoing refinements of the search functions and keyword dictionaries. It began as a project launched and carried on by women, and for this reason it was named “Arianna”, alluding at the Dionysos project conceived by my mentor, Cesare Molinari.

We soon realized that Shakespearean visual imagery far exceeded that of other classical authors, both in terms of extension and of iconographic variety, therefore we decided to concentrate our efforts on this domain. Meanwhile, the project secured a two-year archival grant from the Caritro Foundation, with Pergine Spettacolo Aperto as leading partner and the Centro Culturale Santa Chiara as co-organizer. From 2011 to 2013, with the support of these institutions, important milestones were reached in terms of public outreach. The database was made available online by the IT company HG Blu, led by Alain Nardelli, and presented in March 2013 at the first international Shakespearean symposium held in Trento (see the volume Picturing Drama: Illustrazioni e riscritture dei grandi classici, dall'antichità ai nostri giorni). At the same time, collaborations were established with prominent Italian and foreign institutions, which enabled us to include less represented historic, geographic and thematic fields, such as opera. Between 2013 and 2015, the project received a further boost thanks to the contribution of Valeria Tirabasso, who completed her doctoral thesis on Shakespeare's The Tempest and coordinated the Trento team for over two years. Moreover, students from the University of Trento were given the opportunity to take part in the project through internship at the Laboratorio Teatrale. Starting 2015, a significant partnership has been established with Fondazione del Teatro Massimo, which has provided financial support over multiple years and granted access to its historical archive's material, now included in the database. Considering the project's international calling, the search interface and the terms of the keyword dictionary fields have been entirely translated into English. The second international Shakespearean conference was held in Trento in October 2015 (see the volume Shakespeare off-scene/Shakespeare un-seen: le scene raccontate nell'iconografia shakespeariana).

2016 and 2017 were transitional years, focused on refining the existing contents and on selective acquisitions, such as in the case of illustrated editions and other sets of particular scholarly relevance. However, a key development was the successful attainment of a major improvement: the makeover of the platform, aimed at enabling all collaborators to operate directly online. The re-elaboration was entrusted to the IT company Maxmile. This further goal was finally reached at the beginning of 2018, and the archive was moved to a dedicated server of the University of Trento. From that moment on and until 2019, the coordination of the working group was entrusted to PhD student Enrico Piergiacomi. The third international Shakespearean symposium was held in Trento in November 2019 (see the volume Shakespeare's Characters Transposed: Iconography, Adaptations, Cultural Exchanges and Staging), funded by the CeASUm Centre of Excellence of Trento University. During 2020, the year of the pandemic, group activities never came to a stop; on the contrary, tasks were carried on and the weekly online meetings with collaborators and interns intensified, leading to highly positive outcomes. Starting 2021, some of the more experienced collaborators - Giovanna Giangregorio, Giulia D'Agostitni and Rachele Bassan - took on the coordination of the internship groups. We also undertook an ambitious pilot project: the translation into English of the remaining discursive fields still in Italian (Title, Description, and Annotations). This task represents a major challenge demanding consistent human and financial resources, yet we consider it essential for the international dissemination of the archive. The work continued throughout 2022 and 2023 with the integration of significant card sets concerning 19^th-century illustrated editions. In autumn 2023 the obsolescence of the IT platform caused security issues in the website. For this reason, the archive remained inaccessible to basic-level users for months. Nonetheless, the group's work continued focusing on the re-organization of content with a view to a new digital interface, in order to improve security and add more developed functionalities. Thanks to financial support provided by the Excellence Project, the complete re-elaboration of the database was entrusted to Heima Web Engineering and was completed in autumn 2024, after a long and careful process of revision and refinement of the tools aimed to meet our specific requirements. The purpose was to build a new and more performative platform for the Basic Search, reproposing the original design organized into four sections (Play, Adaptations, Image Details, Staging). Among all improvements, it is worth mentioning some important additional functions that have been introduced both for users and operators. For instance, an Advanced Search interface has been created, which enables more sophisticated queries through a complex filtering system. Starting from November 2024, the work on the archive resumed at full pace with positive outcomes, and the participation of internship groups coordinated by Giovanna Giangregorio and me. Currently, our efforts are directed towards the refinement of the records published until now, systematically proceeding by play and section, in preparation for the seminar More… than fancy's images': Shakespearean Characters in Their Context (convenors: Sandra Pietrini, Svenn-Arve Myklebost, Rachele Bassan) to be held during the 2026 World Shakespeare Congress in Verona. There is still a huge amount of work to be done, which we hope to achieve with everyone's cooperation. However, sometimes it's good to look back at how far we have come…