Simone Signaroli

SUMMARY: In the early XVIIth century in Valle Camonica, a valley of the central Italian Alps, public officials of the Commune made use of antiquities and medieval archive documents in order to assert the rights of their own land, providing an example of connections between historical scholarship and political affairs. Chancellors of the Commune were in fact engaged in some correspondence with contemporary antiquaries: chancellors Bernardino Ronchi and Alberto Isonni with Ottavio Rossi, a widely known scholar, and with Pietro Paolo Ormanico, an acute reader of classical inscriptions, both from Brescia. Meanwhile, Rossi and Ormanico, but also Philippus Cluverius, professor at Leiden, were able to establish on new foundations the ancient and medieval history of that region: sources for their studies were Roman inscriptions, relevant to the Tribus Quirina and Res Publica Camunnorum, and ancient geographical works, medieval Latin chronicles and medieval epigraphic monuments.

For centuries the most precious documents of the Commune of Brescia have been preserverd in an iron coffer (cassone ferrato). A text on the martyrs Faustinus and Jovita, printed at Brescia in 1624, tells that the coffer had been originally made to contains the relics of the Saints, but it was soon turned to keep the documents.

Some documents from the historical archive of the commune of Brescia attest that, in the early seventeenth century, the municipality of that town was institutionally preserving both epigraphical and manuscript evidences of its own history. In 1605, the text of a classic inscription was registered in one of the communal administrative books. Then, in 1607, a manuscript of Iacopo Malvezzi’s Chronicon, written by Tommaso Mercanda in 1545, was acquired by the commune. This book still lays in the city historical archive (Brescia, Archivio di Stato, Archivio Storico Civico 1463). On the same occasion another manuscript was bought too: a copy of Cristoforo Soldo’s vernacular chronicle, indentifiable as the manuscript now Brescia, Biblioteca Queriniana, K VI 23, copied by the same Tommaso Mercanda.