Printed books

Description

Parma Fund

The Parmense Fund, as mentioned, constitutes the historical memory of the increase in the bibliographic, manuscript and printed, as well as documentary and artistic heritage of the Library since its institution; this term in fact indicates, regardless of the signature attributed to them over time, all the acquisitions that have entered the Institute by free choice of the librarians who have succeeded one another over the centuries.
The original nucleus was put together by Paolo Maria Paciaudi, its first librarian (1761-1774, 1778-1785), who a year before the inauguration could already count on 24,000 volumes.
Paciaudi’s successor, Ireneo Affò (1785-1797), historian and man of letters, despite having fewer economic resources, managed to acquire the library of the surgeon Antonio Galli (1786), the Gridario degli Stati parmensi and other books including testimonies of national things from Captain Giuseppe Ferrari.
Angelo Pezzana, secretary from 1804 and director from 1808 to 1862, a careful historian and philologist, increased the Parma collection with a constant policy of purchases and exchanges, securing, in addition to the best-known collections of Rossi and Ortalli, the libraries of Antonio Bertioli (1810) and Filippo Linati (1841), the collection of Giard (1841), of the Sanvitale family (1838 and 1841), of Bartolomeo Gamba, of Francesco Pizzetti and of Ferdinando Cornacchia (1842), of Michele Colombo and his disciple Bonaventura Porta (1843-1844), of Angelo Schenoni (1846).
Of particular interest among all the works acquired by Pezzana are the Gamba, Colombo, Porta collections.
In the spring of 1842, Angelo Pezzana purchased for 10,500 lire four thousand volumes, fundamental for the study of the Italian language, which had belonged to Bartolomeo Gamba and which the erudite bibliographer had used to draft his work: Series of language texts. Friend and correspondent of the Parma librarian, B. Gamba was considered by his contemporaries to be “the prince of Italian bibliography”.

Michele Colombo (1747-1838), priest, scholar of exact and natural sciences, “master of language”, was a tutor in Parma for the Porta family, travelled extensively everywhere, purchasing books and manuscripts, and had various relationships with the scholars of the time. The “Colombiana” entered the Palatina in 1843, also bringing the manuscripts collected by Michele Colombo, including Piero della Francesca’s De perspectiva pingendi, a rich collection of letters and the Porta Library, important for its natural history texts.

Among the collections that, despite the complexity of the increase in the heritage, have maintained an autonomous position and are to be considered important for the typology of documents, we should mention the Miscellanea Erudita .

Erudite Miscellany

This is a large collection (about 15,000 pieces) of pamphlets, occasional compositions, treatises, academic productions printed in the Duchy between the 16th and 19th centuries, also fundamental for the history of Parma typography, and still awaits study and adequate cataloguing.

Spanish Fund

The library has a remarkable collection of Spanish-language and Hispanic-content publications, both in manuscript and in print. The importance of Iberian civilization and the origin of the ducal dynasty of Bourbon-Parma can be considered the most striking reasons for such a wealth of bibliography. Of great importance are the two collections of Spanish theatrical texts from the “Siglo de oro”: The collection of works by Lope de Vega and Comedias de diferentes autores. The first, in its 47 volumes, contains 124 manuscript works and 267 printed works by the great Spanish author.
The second, which consists of 87 volumes, has handed down to us 800 texts including zarzuelas and comedies, of which 152 are yet to be attributed. This is a particularly consulted and studied collection, precisely because it still constitutes a partially unexplored territory. All the printed volumes have been catalogued in SBN .

Palatine Fund

The Palatine collection represents the most significant increase in the history of the Library since its inception, and occurred in 1865 with the acquisition, desired by the Italian government, of the private library of the Bourbon-Parma dukes, known as the Palatina.

The collection consists of 1032 manuscripts, many of which are illuminated, 349 incunabula, and approximately thirty thousand volumes, collected in Lucca thanks above all to the work of the librarian Pietro Pera.

These gradually increased the initially modest library of Maria Luigia of Bourbon with much more significant collections, such as the Bertiniana Library, the Library of Lazzaro Papi, and the Beccadelli papers, important documents from the period of the Council of Trent.

The Palatine collection, made available to the public in Lucca in 1837, was transferred to Parma ten years later, on the occasion of the dynasty’s return to Parma; here the collection was enriched by the private library of Duke Ferdinand I, which remained in the ducal palace of Colorno after his death.

The volumes cover a time span from the sixteenth-century editions to mid-nineteenth-century editions, with a significant presence of editions from Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands, as well as, obviously, Italian ones.

There are also Hungarian editions and a collection in Armenian, consisting of two manuscripts and 154 printed books.

Finally, it is necessary to mention two further subjects of research and study that can be identified in this collection: the large quantity of engravings present within the volumes, and the wide typology of bindings that they present.

The SBN cataloguing of the ancient books (1601-1830) of the collection is currently underway .

Conventual funds

The suppressions of the convents in the Parma area were carried out at different times: in 1768 some convents and corporations were suppressed, among the main ones those of San Martino de’ Bocci and Chiaravalle della Colomba, and the entire order of the Society of Jesus.
While for the books of the former there are rare traces, for the Jesuit libraries there are inventories and registers that indicate the valuable works identified by PM Paciaudi to be placed in the Parma area.
These are largely dispersed among the other works of the library, except for a large group of a popular nature closely linked to the activity and history of the Jesuits.
The second suppression seems to have occurred in two stages, in 1805 and 1810: the first does not seem to have had any relevance for the purposes of the Library, while for that of 1810, the officials in charge of the suppression or their representatives drew up specific inventories of the libraries on which the director Angelo Pezzana identified the books to be assigned to the Library with a simple “Reservé”; these volumes were also placed among the others of the institute, according to a logic promoted by Paciaudi and partly maintained by his successors.
If this system had continued today we would not have a fund of suppressed convents.
Following the Unification of Italy and the open conflict between the new state and the Church, the last suppression took place in 1866.
All the books of the convent libraries were delivered separately to the Palatina and there ordered according to a progressive number for each conventual order.
They are divided and identifiable as follows:

• The works from the Convent of the Annunciata: Conv. Ann. from 1 to 1273 for 3,000 volumes;
• Those of the Capuchin Convents: Conv. Cap. from 1 to 2283 for over 4,600 volumes;
• Those of the Reformed Convents: Conv. Ref. from 1 to 1960, for almost 3,000 volumes;
• Those of the Library of San Giovanni Evangelista Conv. Ben. from 1 to 6103 for over 15,000 volumes.

Overall, the conventual funds would contain over 25,000 volumes if, as on previous occasions, the librarians had not deemed it appropriate to extract numerous works to enrich the constituent funds of the Library, also extrapolating manuscripts and incunabula. Following the bombing suffered in 1945, these collections ended up in disarray, which has been remedied in recent decades by returning thousands of works and volumes to their respective funds and starting a careful work of restoration of the books.

Modern Funds

Tarchioni Library

In 1928 Prudenza Tarchioni donated to the Palatina the Library of her brother Mansueto (1843-1913), a scholar of Catholicism of which he was an integralist exponent, author of a volume of poems and several essays on philosophy, history and literary criticism.
Composed of 11,500 works for a total of approximately 18,000 volumes and a thousand pamphlets, the most represented subjects are classical and modern languages ​​and literature, philosophical and historical sciences, religion.
The Library was damaged by the bombings, which in May 1944 hit the Palatina Library. All the printed volumes have been catalogued in SBN .

Ferrarini Library

In 1950, Giovanni Masi, when he acquired the books of Mario Ferrarini (1874-1950), a musicologist and scholar of dramatic literature, by bequest to the Library, wrote that with this collection the Palatina was able to satisfy, like few others, the needs of scholars of dramatic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Ferrarini Theatre Library consists of 3650 volumes and pamphlets, excluded by will from home lending. All printed volumes have been catalogued in SBN .

Modern songbook collection

It consists of a series of loose sheets, in the typical paper of the planets of fortune, on which are printed stories in verse, generally with dramatic or passionate subjects, often with figurative commentary in woodcut. Edited by the dialect poet from Parma Alfredo Zerbini (1895-1955), an employee of the Palatina, the Raccolta can be considered an important testimony of the Italian popular culture of the years between the 19th and 20th centuries. With the exception of a few, the sheets appear to have been printed in Fiorenzuola d’Arda at the Pennaroli printing house between 1855 and 1915.

Catalogues

Paper catalogues

• Alphabetical catalog by authors Paciaudi

The catalogue, whose compilation covers the years from 1762 to approximately 1929, consists of approximately 200,000 movable cards, handwritten, in the format of 9.50 x 6 cm. Adopted by PM Paciaudi, the first librarian of the Palatina Library, who compiled many cards in his own hand, it is the first alphabetical catalogue with movable cards in Italy. It was gradually updated and expanded with new cards by his successors.

• Alphabetical catalog by authors Alvisi

Catalogue of printed books that entered the library from its foundation (1762) to 1900. The catalogue is composed of 42 volumes (format 53 x 43 cm) of which 6 are supplements, each containing approximately 120 cards. It was compiled by Alvisi between 1893 and 1915.

The catalogue can be consulted online:
Alvisi Catalogue
Alvisi Catalogue – Supplement

• Alphabetical catalogue by subject , with international format cards, of the works entered after 1900 and constantly updated following the indications of the Subject Directory of the National Library of Florence.
• Systematic catalogue by subject , according to the Dewey Decimal Classification, of the works entered into the library since 1980.
• Alphabetical catalogue by author , in cards, of the printed books of the Michele-Mariotti Fund.
• Alphabetical catalog by periodical titles
• Alphabetical catalogue by title of Parma periodicals
• Collective catalogue by subject , according to the Dewey Decimal Classification, of the current periodicals owned by the Parma libraries.
• Zorzanello Catalog of Incunabula

Manuscript catalogue with removable cards arranged alphabetically and collected in five folders; it was written by Pietro Zorzanello and describes the Library’s incunabula. The catalogue can be consulted online:
Zorzanello Catalogue

• Systematic catalogue of erudite miscellanies

It is a catalogue in a single volume, manuscript, of the pamphlets collected in the volume, organised according to their format ( folio , quarto , octavo ). The catalogue can be consulted online.

Online catalog

OPAC of the Parma Library System. The electronic catalogue, created in November 2001 from the merger of the pre-existing city catalogues and created with the Sebina Indice software , includes over a million bibliographic records of documents owned by the libraries of the Municipality of Parma, by the local authority libraries of the Province of Parma, by the libraries of the University of Parma, by the Palatina Library and by the libraries of other state, ecclesiastical and private institutions in Parma. 109 libraries belong to the Parma Hub.

The database includes the majority of printed documents that entered the Palatina Library since the beginning of the 20th century and recoveries of previously acquired collections, the most important of which is the Palatine Collection.

The Italian Cinquecentine of the Library are listed in Edit16.