Guido Costa

Desulo, group of schoolchildren who wear traditional clothing. Photograph by Guido Costa

The photographer Guido Costa was born in Sassari in 1871 and lived in Cagliari, where he died in 1951. Raised in a family with vast cultural interests (he was the son of Enrico Costa, a well-known writer and scholar from Sardinia), he practiced the profession of an English teacher, but he was also a publicist journalist and photography enthusiast, who practiced as an amateur, but with excellent results.

The history of the Costa Fund
The Costa Fund includes panoramic and particular views of landscapes (villages in the interior of the island, in particular Desulo and Aritzo, and Campidano), as well as photos of objects and artifacts of material culture, traditional activities and human types.
Already owned by the former Costume Museum, the fund was sold by the Regional Department of Tourism, which had purchased it directly from the heirs at the end of the sixties of the last century, and merged into the ISRE collections.
The collection consists of 127 negatives, of which 81 on glass sheets and 46 on film in 13 x 18 cm format, with some copies in the cm & nbsp; 9 x 12. The images date back mostly to the first decades of the twentieth century. Only a couple are dated (1916) and some have the author's caption on the edge of the negative.
The negatives are, overall, in good condition, with the exception of some that have fractures, threads or deterioration of the gelatin. In relatively recent times, in view of the preparation of an exhibition dedicated to the photographer, a professional photographic print (A3 format) has been made of each negative and, in order to preserve the originals and facilitate their viewing, the printing format 13 x 18; even more recently, for the same purpose, the transfer has been made to digital media.

Update

10/2/2026 - 10:59