Una eredità. Diari, note etnografiche, appunti di viaggio, fotografie dei soggiorni di Lamberto Loria nella Nuova Guinea britannica (1888-1897)

At the end of his intense explorations in British New Guinea, Lamberto Loria brought back to Italy an impressive collection of materials of different nature: his diaries, the ethnographic notes and the photographs belonging to the periods between 1888 and 1890 and 1891 and 1897, as well as artefacts and bone remains. In the article, the presentation of the materials (regarding the contents and the hypothesis on the drafting and revision of the texts) offers an overview as complete as possible of the precious writing of the Italian explorer. Hitherto unpublished, the diaries and the ethnographic notes help to reconstruct the research style and gaze of Loria on the encountered population of the remote region. To complete the picture one adds the description of the photographic corpus, mostly stored in the Photographic Archive of the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico ‘Luigi Pigorini’, whose richness reveals the high importance that the photographic medium holds for Loria during the documentation of the native customs.