One is pleasantly amazed at these 81 small photo albums meticulously bound with flowered, almost childlike paper and 32 neatly arranged and subdivided binders with ‘library precision’ that make up the Cairo Fund. And the astonishment grows when, leafing through them, we realise the wealth they contain.
The Cairo Collection arouses curiosity and interest not only because it collects, in a very well-organised and comprehensive manner, 7075 photographs of artistic, architectural and archaeological sites in Rome (churches, palaces, monuments, alleys, squares…) but also because the images often capture singular perspectives. Curious details of street furniture such as pillars, vents, roofs, fake windows, roosts, pickets, balconies, gates, altanas etc. are depicted, everyday scenes of city life: a local market, workers at work in the streets of the city, children playing in the park, groups of tourists strolling; extraordinary events of the new millennium: the funeral of Pope John Paul II, but also those of Alberto Sordi and Nino Manfredi, the long lines of citizens paying their respects at the Campidoglio to the bodies of Italian soldiers who died in the Nassirya massacre, the Unity Festival, Nanni Moretti’s first rounds of the world… All this is accompanied by 
by sometimes serious, sometimes humorous or satirical comments, by poems, Romanesque sonnets, erudite quotations.
The Collection, donated to the Casanatense Library in 2006, is an archive consisting of 7075 images of Rome, mostly colour photographs taken between 1990 and 2005, plus some postcards, photocopies and newspaper clippings. The author, Laura Cairo (Rome 1922-2006), was a Casanatense librarian with an eclectic and intellectually lively personality; a profound connoisseur of the Library’s holdings, both ancient and modern, from which she drew stimuli and ideas to initiate new studies and cataloguing projects. As a passionate ‘Romanist’ that she was, walking around Rome with her camera, she observed the city with curiosity and attention, ‘photographing’ it in the multiplicity and originality of its aspects.
It thus constituted a rich and articulate collection of photos accompanied by valuable historical and artistic information, which immediately emerged as an interesting historical document and a poignant testimony to the social customs of the city.
Some of the photos are contained in 58 albums divided into the 22 districts of Rome (the last one contains photocopies of the plans of all the ancient and modern districts) and in 7 albums dedicated to the Flaminio, Parioli, Nomentano, Appiolatino, Ostiense, Gianicolense and Trionfale districts. Other photos are kept in binders and albums with a thematic structure: Belltowers, Roman Encounters, Madonnelles, Walls, Picchiotti, Talking Stones, Roste, The Tiber, Villas, Street Furniture, Bestiary, Stone Edicts, Windows and Small Windows, Roman Fountains, The Janiculum, Tombstones, Museums, Obelisks, Domes, Columns, Panoramas, Rome Sings, Rome Yesterday, Poetic Rome, Plaques, Roofs, Miscellaneous.
On the reverse side of almost all photographs, one finds handwritten notes with the name of the photographed object, the location, the date of shooting and interesting historical-artistic notes written on flyers inserted in the photo cases or pasted on the reverse side of the photos or on the album cover (where it is also common to find the indication of the district boundaries).
The ‘thematic’ photographs in the binders are pasted on blank sheets and accompanied by typewritten captions with the name and place of the photographed object, annotations, personal comments and excerpts of dialect poetry (Roman Encounters). They are often enriched by historical introductions (as in the first album of the series), sometimes also by appendices and bibliography.
The Collection has been researched, catalogued and digitised. Cataloguing follows the standard F form, from which only the fields deemed most suitable for describing the material photographed have been extrapolated. The catalogue is partly searchable in the Library’s Opac (to date, about 3,500 cards are online) and the digitised images in jpg format are currently being included in the relevant records. The web interface through the ‘expert search’, which among the options contains the item ‘subject photographs’, allows the user to select the search by typing several subjects and correlating them with each other; for example if we want to highlight the photographs depicting the doors of the buildings in the Trevi district, we will type the three subjects in the appropriate fields: e.g. Subject Photographs = Trevi district. Subject Photographs = palaces. Subject Photographs = gates.