After Antonio Vivaldi's death in Vienna on the night of July 27-28, 1741, in impoverished circumstances, his "greedy heirs" wasted no time in selling off his entire estate, presumably as early as late summer of that year. The handwritten manuscripts that had remained at his Venetian residence were acquired by the bibliophile Senator Jacopo Soranzo. The scholar Franca Porticelli has meticulously documented this affair.
The examination of the collection revealed a surprising discovery: the inventory numbers of the works indicated that only half of Giacomo Durazzo's collection had passed to Marcello. The other half was presumably still in the possession of another family heir. Thus began the search for the missing portion, with the Vivaldi codices already housed in the National Library in Turin.
The examination of the collection revealed a surprising discovery: the inventory numbers of the works indicated that only half of Giacomo Durazzo's collection had passed to Marcello. In the autumn of 1926, a Salesian Fathers boarding school in Piedmont discovered numerous old volumes in its archives, which the administration intended to sell to antique dealers. The National Library in Turin was called in to appraise the material. Dr. Alberto Gentili, Professor of Music History at the University of Turin, undertook this task. Upon opening the first crate, he found volume after volume of Vivaldi's autographs. He immediately recognized the need for a cautious approach to prevent the manuscripts from falling into the hands of professional dealers, which would have inevitably led to the dispersal of individual manuscripts and their potential sale abroad.
The Turin collection comprises a total of 15,000 manuscript pages, which have been housed in the University Library of Turin since the 1930s. The complete collection contains no fewer than 450 works by Vivaldi: hundreds of concertos for various instruments, as well as numerous vocal pieces, both secular and sacred.