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Among the hidden treasures kept in the Library, here is a treasure of which there was no news: a collection of bound manuscripts, able to compose a crown of topics and writings, distributed over four centuries, with extremely varied contents. There are several strands that characterize the collection. In the historical Savoy lodging, are distinguished:
- Origine de' titoli della Reale Casa di Savoia , attributed to Angelo Paolo Carena
- Dizionario corografico de' Stati del Re di Sardegna by the paleographer Celestino Combetti,
- Cronica del Monferrato of Galeotto del Carretto,
- Memorie historiche sopra il Re di Sardegna Carlo Emanuele IV , surgeon John Gallo Cuneo,
- other works by Giuseppe Ravizza, Carlo Denina, Giuseppe Agostino Torelli.
Among the first-hand sources, the two famous reports to the Doge and the Venetian Senate of Ambassador Marco Foscarini, on the abdication of Vittorio Amedeo II and the conditions of the Savoy State in 1743, and the memoirs relating to the office of Grand Master of the House of His Highness - order collections of Madam Royal.
Among the local stories, we find:
- Storia di Vercelli in two volumes, by Fileppi,
- Memoria della fondazione [...] della Città di Mondovì, Baldassarre Vassallo,
- Origine Civitatis Alexandriae, 18th century story by Raffaele Lumello,
- Cronaca di Fossano , Giovanni Battista Dray, very important,
- the volume recently found, of the Memoria di Centallo o sia Cronaca dell'anno 1619 fino al 1662 until 1662, from the Archives Frejlino,
- Memorie istoriche della Città di Carmagnola , the Franciscan Giambattista Sola Vaggione, already belonged to the historian Carena.
Among the autobiographies, in addition to the one in three volumes by Francesco Bal, studied by Maria Carla Lamberti, there is a fragment of the adventurous life of Giambattista Boetti (the "prophet Mansur", and that of the painter Ottavio Giovanni Rapetti, donated by Terenzio Grandi in 1967, with the four volumes of the Various Writings of Rapetti himself.
A group of five manuscript volumes comes from the Fondo Anselmi.
There are, except in the case of a seventeenth-century treatise on medicine written in Turin, theological works, among which we can mention an epic poem on the Shroud of 1763, Italian version of an original Latin, and a Tractatus de Deo Uno, of that Falletto of Pertusio, which collects the teachings of the Dominican Fr. Giacinto Sala.
From the Giulio Fund comes a course of theoretical mechanics by Carlo Ignazio Giulio, 1853.
Of note, a copy of the so-called "Biblioteca Carlo Emmanuella", ie an ancient bibliography of the works of the House of Savoy; the collection of manuscripts of the late '700 on the parks of Racconigi and Santena, a hand-decorated volume relating to the Arpino family of Poirino and finally a small part of the Melano-Spurgazzi archive, with interesting documents on the construction of Piazza Statuto in Turin and the Turin-Genoa railway.
A peculiarity of the manuscripts often consists in their marginality, in their presentation as fragments, even when the intention is ambitious or the occasion is great, as in the case of the poor Gille Badin said Condé, that passed through the war campaigns in Piedmont in the years 1744-45, noting chronicles and songs of his time and his not happy existence as a soldier of the king of France: his manuscript, back in Piedmont, figure in our library next to the most unusual Rimedj for the most varied corporal difficulties, collected by friar Eusebio da Carmagnola in 1615 ("The library of history and culture of Piedmont" by W. Canavesio, Publisher Province of Turin 1997).
- Catalogue (pdf 378 KB)
Collection of frontispices on:
Extract from the collection of bound manuscripts, on: