day, the priest of the Mother church, at the first mass, gave the baptism, choosing a name decided on by those present – unless the baby was with a card suggesting a specific name.
The register of foundlings, therefore, listed every newborn found alive or, unfortunately, dead. Most of the records were filled in by hand in the same graceful cursive,3 making some parts hard to read but still clear.
Giacomo Maggiore, Salvatore Mundi, Giulia Condelli, Caterina Fragale, Anna Santalucia, were only some of the invented names given to foundlings at the time of registration, for lack of any other information.
I left the record office at about 11.45 a.m. The registers contained the same information, except for the names and little else. After all, I thought they were just registers of births and deaths, not very different from today's ones.
Back home, I found the table set. The cold had made me burn a lot of calories and, even before the whole family had arrived, I greedily devoured countless hot and crispy cro-quettes and thistle fritters, whose delicious smell I still remember.
After lunch, exhaustion set in, but I didn't have time to doze off, because around a quarter to four, I woke up by a message from Bastiano Montagna. He asked me if he could put the registers I had consulted away or if I had stopped by to look at something else. But what else was there to look at? Indeed, I recalled a few loose bundles piled up without any specific dates. The cold had perhaps dampened my curiosity too, but I decided to indulge in another afternoon of study.
At half-past four, I went to the records office again.
I had no intention of taking any more mouldy boxes out of the shelves, as they were damp to the point of disintegration. They were stored in a room lit by a dim and flickering lamp. I imagined that the stale air was also damaging the electrical cables, so I helped myself with the torch on my phone.
The was a mess all over: boxes were packed with acts, inheritance records, collections of Bourbon decrees, shredded codes, collections of laws, statutes, concessions, private contracts.
Bastiano brought me a beautiful little book on parchment. He took it from a box of church books, or so he told me. There was indeed a wooden box stored in a dark corner containing contracts, deeds of gift, wills, legacies, in short, a series of random documents, but related to liturgical offices and ecclesiastical matters and not to Municipal correspondence.
There were also missal, prayer books, an eighteenth-century “Importanti discorsi per l’esercizio delle bona morte” by a certain Giuseppe Antonio Bordoni, a Latin text, “Epitome thoelogiae moralis ad confessariorum examen expediendum”, by Michele Manzo published in Naples at the printing house of Pasquale Tizzano (dated 1836), “Ristretto di mistica dottrinale” by Father Giannotti da Perugia (mid 18 century), a great collection of selected sermons by Father Da Loiano published in Naples in 1827.
I was particularly struck by a series of biblical tomes with parchment covers and gilt tooling on the spine, belonging to Sacred Scripture is just the vulgate in Latin and vulgar with the explanations of the literal and spiritual meaning taken by the Holy Fathers and by ecclesiastical authors by Le Maitre de Sacy priest published in Naples in 1786 by Gaetano Castellano. Many volumes were missing, also because this work appeared colossal.
At first glance, the complete collection could have consisted of at least forty volumes. I saw only a dozen, but they were enough to lead me to a leading discovery. At least those texts – but I assumed the other church books as well – were all from the vanished Abbey of Sant'Agata di Galati, which had once housed an order of Poor Clare nuns.
I noticed the same disturbing handwritten note inside each of the remaining tomes:
Sor Clara Rosa Girgentani Custos Veritatis4
What truth could this Poor Clare from Agrigento be the keeper of? I could only hope to learn something from the other tomes. I took them out of the box one by one and placed them on the desk; who knows how long they had been in the dark!
There were twelve of them, some of them incredibly well preserved, such as volume XIII containing the two books of the Parapolimeni, or volume XIV of the prophets Ezra, Nehemiah, and Tobit. However, other volumes were in a poor state, due to the humidity they had been exposed for who knows how many years, and that has increased their deterioration.
After a first reading, I slumped in the chair, tired, because even just reading those pages for ten minutes caused me a certain amount of effort. The letters were mostly small, perhaps to make the book more tiny and pocket-sized, and some of the handwritings were very different from today's style (the letter “s”, for example, was printed in a font more similar to a modern “f”). The sheets, wrinkled and thin, were damp and almost stuck together.
I felt drained but struck by the thickness of one of the tomes; it was two different shades of colour, the first half being more in keeping with the chromaticity of the book and the second half being darker and more worn. I opened the text. It was Tome X of the New Testament containing St. Paul's Epistle II to the Corinthians and the Epistle to the Galatians.
I was stunned.
Unlike the handwritten note on the other texts, this one had a rectangular cut-out that read “Ex Libris u.J.d. a. Raymundi M.Musumeci Paroch. s.J.b. Syracusis”.
Touching it, I realised that it was a paper scroll that had been laid out in a second moment. Exposing the page slightly to the sun, I noticed something written under that piece of paper. But at the time, I could not mess with the text too much to free the hidden writing, nor could I consult it. Employees were hanging around my desk, and I could attract their attention. Besides, detaching the paper without damaging the writing underneath required painstaking work and tools that I did not have with me.
As dusk fell, it became dark, and it was time to leave. And yet, my curiosity was eating me. Under the pretence of putting the tomes back in the wooden box, I returned to that dark room. The other volumes returned to their long rest, while
Tome X “decided” to come with me.
I was unfair, and I am to blame, but after so long, I confess that I would do it again.
εὕρηκα (EUREKA)
To remove the paper without compromising the writing underneath, I thought of a particular technique. I heated some water in a small pan, and, with a brush stolen from my niece, I moistened the surface of the leaflet.
The paper was similar in size to those cards attached to wedding favours. Despite my evident clumsiness in all things that involve good craftsmanship, I carefully managed to re-move the addition.
Once I removed the delicate piece of paper, I immediately proceeded to blow-dry the uncovered surface, still very wet, with a hairdryer so as not to melt the ink and undo all the work done – sometimes YouTube tutorials come in handy. And this is what emerged:
Sicut prediximus et nunc iterum dico: Si quis vobis evangelizaverit praeter id, quod accepistis, anathema sit.5
I did not fall into the trap of believing that it was just the clerical pseudo-dread of a cloistered nun. I strongly felt a connection, a common thread which, first through Calogero Bau and then through Bastiano Montagna, had led me to that tome.
I transcribed the sentence as it was
