Barbara has been a resident restorer (sectors 9, 10) with the Opificio delle Pietre Dure (Ministry of Cultural Affairs) since 2018 and was previously (1999-2018) with the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence. Currently preparing her PhD in art history at La Sapienza, she has a three-year degree in cultural heritage sciences and a master’s degree in archive and library and information science.
After gaining her professional diploma in restoration, issued by the Regione Toscana in 1993, she pursued her training at Trinity College Dublin under the guiding hand of Anthony Cains (1994), at George Eastman House in Rochester (N.Y-) (2010), at JPC in Tokyo (2012), at the Getty Foundation in Prague (2015) and in Budapest (2014). A lecturer in photographic restoration with the Opificio and the Istituto centrale per la patologia degli archivi e del libro, she is an assistant lecturer in the history and identification of photographic techniques at the Università degli studi di Firenze, and has held numerous seminars at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, at the Accademia di belle arti di Brera and its counterpart in Bologna and at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu.
She has held seminars on emergency management for photographic heritage at the Università degli studi di Udine, the Università degli studi di Trieste, the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, the Istituto centrale per la patologia degli archivi e del libro and the Opificio delle Pietre Dure. She has taken part in numerous operations for the rescue of flooded items when working at the restoration laboratory in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, while intervening in the field in 2023 in Forlì, Montemurlo and Quarrata.