Collecting pictures in order to remember lives from the past, examining the built spaces that have housed these bodies more closely, observing them together with their accoutrements which have since dispersed, yet to emerge on the surface as forgotten traces, and thus shedding light on a present which is interwoven with the past in a multiplicity of ways... these are some of the reasons why more than thirty years ago a group of scholars at Iuav – meeting in what was previously the Institute of History and later the Department of the History of Architecture, including Bruno Zevi, Manfredo Tafuri, Fancesco Dal Co – assembled a collection of slides and old glass plate negatives which now amounts to nearly 100,000 images. This atlas of images, organised through archipelagos of meaning – in practice transparent envelopes containing up to twenty slides each – conveniently viewable on a large light-box. From time to time new routes might be plotted or those previously drawn up by early explorers may be followed. The digitalization of these images, carried out in the late nineties, has paradoxically impoverished the atlas-like form of this remarkable collection: the archipelagos of architecture, painting, sculpture, coinage, artefacts, drawings, plans, documents, maps, portraits, film stills – once organised by various scholars as a rotating display for the walls of Palazzo Badoer – were no longer appreciable in a single glance, whether or not its limits and boundaries were redrawn. This led to ADA, a searchable web database in the form of a Bilderatlas (picture atlas). It quantifies at first sight the abundance and outstanding nature of its iconographic material, distributing them in the form of bright points on a map of the entire globe, thus giving back the ability to visually explore, via ‘light boards’ to both old and new archipelagos of meaning.