The municipally owned Bertarelli Collection in Milan includes a huge number of prints of every kind, country and era, advertising posters and books both ancient and modern. While the original nucleus was donated by the collector Achille Bertarelli (1925), its present scale is due both to purchases and to the generosity of the many donors that have helped to make this institution unique in the panorama of Italian and international culture. Consisting today of approximately 1.000.000 prints and a specialized library of 23.000 books and over 600 volumes of periodicals, the collection can boast numerous items of the highest quality, ranging from the earliest 15th-century woodcuts to works by contemporary masters. The main body is made up of iconographic material bearing witness to the most varied manifestations of human life. There are depictions of historical and current events, portraits, customs, popular images, views of cities and monuments, maps, toy soldiers and games as well as countless small-sized items of printed material, such as business, membership, invitation and calling cards, bookplates, advertising leaflets, lists of provisions, calendars, postcards and all the "minor" documents to be preserved as precious aids in the investigations of historical periods and ways of life.