The popularity of Vivaldi's music today is an astonishing phenomenon, considering that it's only since the early 1950s that his music began to be generally known.
For that, printed music was needed. Just after the war, a young Italian, Antonio Fana, with Angelo Africain, formed the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi. They persuaded a publisher, Ricordi, to print the entire works of Vivaldi. A formidable task, for there are about 750 of them.
In 1926, the College of San Carlo, not far from Turin, was in need of repairs. To raise money, a collection of old books of music in the college library was to be sold. Professor Alberto Gentili discovered that a great many of them were handwritten manuscripts by Antonio Vivaldi.
He persuaded a Turin businessman to buy the collection for the National Library in Turin as a memorial to a young son who had recently died.
The manuscripts had been collected by Count Giacomo Durazzo a few years after Vivaldi's death, but it is not known how he acquired them. Numbers on the volumes indicated that some were missing.
They were eventually found in another branch of the Durazzo family and added to the collection in 1930.