Fotomuseo Giuseppe Panini is a museum and an archive of historical photography, born in 2001 starting from the collection of Giuseppe Panini (1925 - 1996), an important industrialist of Modena who, during the course of his life, collected more than 200.000 photos and 200.000 postcards of the town of Modena and its surroundings. His will was to preserve and transmit to the future generations an important testimony of the history of the city and its territory, as well as of history of photography. The heart of the archive is composed by the collection of the photographs of families of professional photographers, Orlandini, Bandieri and Botti e Pincelli, who worked in Modena since 1870 up to 1980. They photographed the public and private life, the urban transformations, the political and folk demonstrations of the city. Fotomuseo preserves especially the negatives, the most part on glass, and the photographic equipment. Nevertheless, during these years of activity, Fotomuseo enriched the permanent collection with donations, acquisitions, and deposits of photographs of property of public institutions and private individuals, and today the inheritance numbers 1.500.000 images. Our mission today is to preserve, catalogue and make available to the public this important heritage, but also to diffuse in our town the value and importance of photography itself as an historical and artistic mean. For this reason, making exhibitions has become one of our most important activities and the expertise developed in the years has made it possible for us to collaborate with important European museums, such as Albertina of Wien, the National Museum of Art Architecture and Design of Oslo, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica of Rome and The Museum of the City of New York.