#5 Notebook - A Different Way of Looking

This project stems from a simple idea: glassworks cannot be fully understood on their own.

Back to the Roots begins with the archive. Not as a repository of documents, but as the structure through which the history of Fratelli Toso can be read.

Drawings, photographs, murrine samples, prototypes, catalogues, administrative records and personal documents are presented together, allowing visitors to follow the same process through which research itself developed.

The archive is not displayed as a selection of individual pieces, but as a connected body of evidence. Every document, every object and every relationship contributes to a broader understanding of the manufactory.

The glass collection itself is read through the archive. Objects regain their context. People regain their roles. Ideas regain their evolution.

Back to the Roots makes visible what has long remained implicit, inviting visitors to experience the history of Fratelli Toso not as a sequence of objects, but as a network of relationships, processes and discoveries.

Looking back is not an act of nostalgia. It is a way of recognising the roots from which new ideas, new research and new interpretations can continue to grow. By understanding its own history, Fratelli Toso continues an ongoing dialogue between past and future, where the archive is not the end of the story, but the starting point for what comes next.