This project began with the digitalization of about 220 image slides that, given their unmeasurable value, were personally delivered from Peru to Lugano by Adine Gavazzi. The team in Lugano then scanned the images at high resolution, which was quite a time-consuming activity, but necessary to make the pictures and their respective unique stories available to the public.

The “Iconoteca dell’Accademia di Architettura” was realized by USI’s Academy of Architecture and was officially launched at the end of May, 2020. It hosts a variety of image collections related to constructions and territories. The images of Mach Picchu therefore fit very well into the topical frame of the archive. Publishing an image collection inside this online archive guarantees long-term conservation of the images and gives the public access to high-resolution images, which can be downloaded and re-used for other activities. Therefore, this website containing the stories behind the pictures, nicely complements the information available in the archive, focusing much more on what the images represent and what specific stories they tell.