The discovery of the Enrollment Book of Military District 14, a jurisdiction based in northern Buenos Aires that included San Antonio de Areco, with the registration of Segundo Ramírez allowed the author to locate a key piece of information in the life of the man who became the protagonist of Don Segundo Sombra, the masterpiece of Ricardo Güiraldes, this year on the centenary of its first edition.

On March 24, 1877, zoologist Henry J. Carter (1813–1895), a former surgeon in Her Majesty's service in India and now a leading authority on sponges, sent a letter from his home in Devon to his friend Charles Wyville Thomson (1830–1882), a Scottish naturalist trained as a physician at the University of Edinburgh. Carter was returning, classified, the sponge collections gathered by dredging during the Porcupine expedition (1869–1870). Thomson had sent them to Carter in 1872 for examination at his residence, where they remained in his care.

After studying them, Carter sent the scientific material, stored in jars and packed in special crates for transport. He did so with precise instructions.

“This August marks the 90th anniversary of the assassination and disappearance of Federico García Lorca. The Falangists sought to erase his influence and his memory, but Federico lived on in all his readers, who made him a classic of literature and the most widely read Spanish author after Cervantes. His body, which remains missing, is a tragic antithesis for a poet who is so ever-present [...]”

A multifaceted artist, Gisela Paggi approaches him here through her painting. She does so through drawings with “seemingly naive, clean, and almost childlike strokes [that] conceal a subtle perversion, melancholy, and eroticism.”

“Orange. Yellow. We arrived in Florence almost 75 years after Mark Rothko. The city welcomed us with the golden spring sun and a packed schedule for a single day. Inspired by the painter, no doubt, we had chosen to divide the day into blocks to cover everything on offer. From the station, we sped off towards the San Marco Museum, one of the three venues for the exhibition. We walked quickly, with the joy of reuniting and the eagerness of a long-planned program. Entering changed our rhythm. An old Dominican convent converted into a museum [...]”

"At the beginning of the 20th century, postcards were at the height of their popularity and were one of the main ways to learn about cities, monuments, landscapes, and institutions in places often inaccessible to most people. For publishers, a successful postcard had to capture the essence of a place in a single image; for the public, that same image became the visual memory of a beloved, longed-for, or, in many cases, never-visited place. In this way, postcards not only disseminated images of landscapes and buildings but also actively contributed to building the visual memory of cities, monuments, and institutions."

The authors, qualified staff members of the institution, describe their commitment to the donation made by architects Ramón Gutiérrez and Graciela Viñuales: an archive comprising approximately 20,000 books, 14,000 magazine issues (nearly 140 complete titles), and an estimated 6,000 plans. "What does it mean for a public library to take charge of an archive built by others over a lifetime?" they ask.

A goldsmith by trade, Emiliano Celiz explores in this article the boundary that divides—or unites—artistic and artisanal works. Trained in traditional Argentine silversmithing, his desire to explore other stylistic sources led him to venture into the margins of tradition.

In 2015, he had an exhibition at the National Museum of Decorative Arts in Buenos Aires, organized by its then-director, the architect Alberto Bellucci. The exhibition "was very well received by the public and sparked a debate among visitors that, I must admit, surprised me: craft or art? That was the dilemma," recalls Emiliano.

The loss of this friend has led me, as editor of Hilario, to write this article in an intimate tone, straight from the heart. Ramón Gutiérrez, a great historian of Latin American architectural heritage and a tremendous cultural manager, was linked to our publication from its very first issue.

His personal story runs through much of Argentine history, its strengths and weaknesses, and that resilience that allows us to believe that everything is possible, even if we have to tilt at windmills…

Public heritage, it is once again evident, is enriched more by donations from private individuals than by acquisitions made with public funds. This historical truth is confirmed in this article. Abel Alexander, a photographic historian, provides an overview of the creation of museums and other institutions, and sheds light on two enormous donations made by Héctor Pezzimenti and Luis Priamo to the National Library's Photographic Archive and the Espigas Center for Studies, created through an agreement between UNSAM and the Espigas Foundation in 2017. Both share the same objective: to preserve the material and facilitate its access to the public.