Guido Boggiani was an Italian painter, photographer and ethnographer. He began studying painting with Filippo Carcano – father of Lombard naturalism – and in 1881 embarked on a promising artistic career. During those years, he moved to Rome, where he frequented Roman high society and the artistic circles of the time.

In 1887, he left for Argentina, wanting to paint South American landscapes, sell his paintings and explore commercial opportunities between Argentina and Italy.
We know his itineraries thanks to his travel diary, the manuscript of which has been preserved: firstly, he devoted himself to hunting, painting and taking photographs on a journey that would take him to Carmen de Patagones, Choele Choel, Viedma, and Bahía Blanca up to Buenos Aires.
In the Argentine capital, he got in contact with leading members of the Italian community (including Anzani Canzio, Garibaldi’s nephew) and some art dealers. From there, he left for Asunción to begin a journey along the Paraguay River to Puerto Casado, the centre of the “Compañía Casado” tannin enterprise.
From then on, Boggiani became increasely interested in Indigenous art and in the ethnic groups that lived there. He remained in this region for four months, making expeditions to various “ports” in the Upper Paraguay. He painted the indigenous guaná, sanapaná and angaité “tolderías”.
On May 18th 1889, he left Puerto Casado and returned to Asunción.

He then began making trips between Asunción and the Upper Paraguay, where he worked surrounded by Chamacoco people, at first as a trader, and later at a timber extraction site he established. The last part of the diary recounts the expedition to the caduveo territory across the Nabileque River in Mato Grosso. Those pages were revised and expanded in its, Viaggi d’un artista nell'America meridionale (Rome, 1895).

At the end of these travels, Boggiani devoted himself to ethnology (he studied with Angelo Colini) and became one of the leading authorities of his time on the ethnography and ethnohistory of Paraguay and Brazilian Mato Grosso.
From 1893 to 1896, he remained in Italy while studying in Rome.
In 1896, he set sail again for Paraguay to continue his research. At the end of 1901, while on what was to be his last expedition into the jungle before returning to Italy, he was murdered by a group of Chamacocos bravos.

Guido Boggiani's collection entered the Museo delle Civiltà of Rome in three separate stages. In 1894, after a long correspondence with the palethnologist Luigi Pigorini, then director of the Kircherian Museum, Boggiani sold the first part of his collection.
Then he donated about 40 pieces in October of the same year. Finally, in July 1905, the last part of the collection was sold by his brother Oliviero.
The objects arrived at the museum in Rome at a time when Pigorini himself was asserting that “the life of today’s savages” was indispensable “for understanding that of prehistoric man” (1891, 3-8).

The sale by travellers, ethnographers and collectors took place in a context in which the Prehistoric and Ethnographic Museums of Rome and Florence were competing to create the first ethnographic collections.

Boggiani’s artefacts come from the Chamacoco (Yshir), Kadiwéu (Caduveo), Sanapaná, Guaná, Enlhet and Enxet (before called Lengua), Maká, Toba (Qom), Enenlhet, Bororo and Aché (before called Guayakí).
Particularly noteworthy are the elaborate headdresses made of feathers, diadems, bracelets, anklets and other body ornaments, as well as perfectly preserved shamanic objects.
Also remarkable are the geometrically decorated ceramics of the kadiwéu peoples, as well as horn combs, rosewood (Dalbergia sp) or palo santo (Bursera graveolens sp) pipes, and some finely inlaid wooden weaving knives.
Kadiwéu objects include silver jewellery or jewellery made of coloured beads and finely decorated vegetable fibre bags.

The collection at the Museo delle Civiltà has never been exhibited. Its history reflects a frenzy of accumulation (by individuals and institutions) typical of that historical moment. Boggiani collected not only artefacts but also insects, fish and plants, as can be seen from his correspondence with Raffaele Gestro, deputy director of the Civic Museum of Natural History in Genoa. He sold almost everything, but practically nothing saw the light of day in the museum’s display cases. He was the first professional collector of artefacts from Alto Paraguay (some claim that this is precisely why he met his death).

In November 2024, we visited the town of Fuerte Olimpo and, in particular, the two Yshir communities of Virgen Santísima and Abundancia. Zelda Franceschi, Caterina Fidanza, Niccoló Santelia and Agostino Gamberini (University of Torino), as well as Anita Gamberini (University of Palermo) were present on the field.

Fuerte Olimpo, today the capital of the Department of Alto Paraguay, was founded in 1792 under the name of Fuerte Borbón as a fort to contain the siege of the indigenous people and Portuguese penetration into Spanish-controlled lands.

It was the epicentre of Boggiani’s commercial activities. Together with Miguel Ignacio Acevedo, he was responsible for supplying goods to settlers and soldiers. Boggiani traded indigenous artefacts on his own account. The diary contains explicit references to the slave trade (by settlers, but also inter-ethnic) and the sale of indigenous children (practices endorsed by local urban centres, where they were employed as domestic servants).

The descendants of those chamacoco who knew Guido Boggiani now live in Fuerte Olimpo. As in almost all of the indigenous Gran Chaco, they too have now opted for a new name, yshir (the men/the people), because chamacoco is an arawak term that designated groups considered inferior (“the dogs”, “the slaves”). According to the 2022 Paraguayan census, they are divided into two subgroups, the tomaraho (213 people known in literature as “bravos”) and the ybytoso (2.126 people known in literature as“mansos”) of the same linguistic family (zamuco).

The aim of our trip was, on the one hand, to make a digital restitution of these artifacts and, on the other, to share our reflections on our knowledge of them. Today, they are no longer part of everyday ritual life, as Salesian missionaries have been present in Fuerte Olimpo since 1920. Certainly, some of the indigenous interlocutors showed a deep interest in these artifacts, photographs of which we showed them: some struggled to reconstruct their manufacture and ritual use, while others were able to recognise every detail. There is a desire to “preserve” a symbolic and ritual heritage and an awareness that what was taken and “collected” by Boggiani constitutes a precious “cultural heritage”, their “culture”.
This is something that needs to be worked on today.