LUISS Guido Carli hosts a permanent exhibition of calculating and automatic data processing tools used between 1965 and 1997.

RetroMachines traces the history of computing through a selection of items that marked the eras of technology, visual arts, design, and advertising.

The exhibition is named after Vittorio Frosini, an Italian jurist and pioneer of legal informatics in Italy. The collection on display was donated to LUISS in April 2015 by Prof. Gianfranco Caridi and curated in collaboration with LUISS Technological Infrastructure.

This exhibition traces 30 years of evolution in the tools that have changed how we read, write, and communicate, and have come to influence our way of thinking—more and more according to a logical flow, an algorithm.

Each of the objects before you represented an innovation, much like smartphones, self-driving electric cars, and artificial intelligence are today.

These computers are no longer useful; they've become obsolete. But each of us carries in our pockets all the innovations they represented…

The RetroMachines exhibition inspired the video “Ritorno al passato” (Back to the Past), created by students from the LUISS Writing Summer School who participated in the narrative journalism project “Meglio di un Romanzo (in bozze)” (Better than a Novel [in draft form]), developed in collaboration with the Mantua Festivaletteratura.