There are essentially five groups into which the approximately 860 volumes that came to the Library in the first half of the twentieth century and were not strictly related to the 1904 fire can be grouped: the donation of Knight Faustino Curlo; that of Adv. Roberto Ariani; that of the “former fifth-class ordinator-distributor in the National Library of Turin” Ludovico Baldassarre Piano; that of Enrico Carreras (of which no evidence was found among the archival records), and a small group of about 200 volumes that arrived by legal deposit (as per the stamp placed on the bindings or title pages).
Lawyer’s donation. from Turin Roberto Ariani arrived at the Library in July 1946 accompanied by an inventory of the works divided by subject (AsBnuto, fald. 116, fasc. III.C-40): these were mostly legal texts, books on psychology, and volumes on political-social, scientific and religious subjects. A large section consists of books on military subjects, partly devoted to the Italian colonial period; in this regard, the Library also preserves 559 photographs in albums taken by Ariani himself during the period when he was a lieutenant in the 40th Infantry Regiment (“Recollection of Two Years of Libyan War. October 9, 1911 – October 20, 1913,” coll. X. IV.95).
In 1946, on the other hand, Ludovico Baldassarre Piano, donated his own book collection to the Library accompanied by an inventory that altogether surveyed 690 works (AsBnuto, fald. 116, fasc. III.C-41). At the current state of inventorying, 407 encyclopedic, scientific and literary texts produced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been found.
Finally, there are some 20 texts dedicated to experimental spiritualism and the psycho-physical and moral sciences, donated by Enrico Carreras, editor of the magazine la Medianità in Rome, published in the early twentieth century.