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Documents from the Angevin Registers of Naples: Charles I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2013

Evelyn M. Jamison
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Extract

The deliberate, senseless destruction of the documents belonging to the Grande Archivio di Stato of Naples is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, single crime against history committed by the German army during the late war. The circumstances and the results of the act which reduced to ashes this vast collection of records of Southern Italy, covering more than a thousand years, are not as widely known among scholars, much less the general public, as they should be, and they seem therefore to call for some brief account in order to explain the reason of the present publication. Evacuated because of the dangers of air-warfare over Naples from the Archivio to the Villa Montesano near to S. Paolo Belsito some thirty kilometres away, and packed for the most part into 866 solid cases, this priceless treasure of over 30,000 MS. volumes and 50,000 documents under the charge of a keeper of Archives remained undiscovered by the German command until the Allied troops were already approaching.

On 28 September, 1943, however, a foraging party came to the Villa in search of calves wanted for food and found instead cases of records stored for safety. Next morning an officer accompanied by a single soldier arrived; he ordered one of the chests to be opened and carefully inspected the volumes packed within. After the purely historical nature of the deposit had been explained to him and its immense importance from this point of view, he professed himself satisfied and departed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Papers of the British School at Rome , Volume 17 , November 1949 , pp. 87 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © British School at Rome 1949

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References

page 88 note 1 For further information see the ‘Account of the Destruction of the Naples Archives, compiled by the Superintendant of Archives, Conte Riccardo Filangieri di Candida’ in Italian Archives during the War and at its close, compiled by Hilary Jenkinson and H. E. Bell, London, H.M. Stationery Office, 1947, pp. 44–6; see also the report ‘Rovine di Guerra in Napoli’, presented by Ernesto Pontieri to the Deputazione napoletana di Storia patria in Archivio storico per le Provincie Napoletane LXVIII, 1943Google Scholar.

page 88 note 2 R. Filangieri, loc. cit. Appendix 8, pp. 46, 47, 48.

page 88 note 3 Durrieu, P., Les Archives angevines de Naples, 2 voll. (Bibl. des Écoles françhises d'Athènes et de Rome, fasc. 46), 51), Paris, 1886–1887Google Scholar.

page 88 note 4 Capasso, B., Inventario cronologico-sistematico dei Registri angioini, Naples, 1894Google Scholar.

page 89 note 1 For the history of the documents of the Angevin chancery and the repertories see R. Filangieri di Candida, ‘Notamenti e repertori delle Cancellerie Napoletane compilati da Carlo de Lellis e da altri eruditi dei Secoli XVI e XVII’, Naples, 1927.

page 172 note 1 These or similar words seem to have been omitted either in the Register or in the transcript, ed.