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 lesercizio 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.
ερηκα (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 on Google. It may have been a trivial, cheap, and unscholarly method, but in the end, the search engine did its job in full. The Latin inscription was a verse from Letter of Paul to the Galatians, the same epistle held in the second part of that tome. The similarity between the words Galatians and Galàti immediately jumped out at me.
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 on Google. It may have been a trivial, cheap, and unscholarly method, but in the end, the search engine did its job in full. The Latin inscription was a verse from Letter of Paul to the Galatians, the same epistle held in the second part of that tome. The similarity between the words Galatians and Galàti immediately jumped out at me.
What was that sentence then? A revelation? A warning? A clue?
Today I would merely call it a gateway. The hidden and arcane entrance to a story that, even today, I do not feel like defining tragic because that would be trivial, nor romantic because that would not be exhaustive.
Following that inscription, I then opened the tome to the Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle to the Galatians. But to my great surprise, the pages of the epistle were missing, completely removed. In place of the Pauline epistle, a manuscript booklet had been carefully and meticulously placed.
In its original form, this booklet was supposed to be slightly big. However, the Poor Clare nun reduced its size by carefully cutting the margins to camouflage it better within Tome X so that they would fit perfectly into the new book, transforming it into a sort of book within a book.
Only by carefully looking at the back of the tome, could you discern the different colours of the first original part and the subsequent addition. But I had no merit in this discovery, since only by luck I drop my eyes on that book which, placed randomly among the others, revealed that small, different detail. That tome of the Bible concealed within it a handwritten diary.
In the following days, the reading and analysis of what I had discovered utterly captivated me. I threw myself wholeheartedly into the events that unfolded before my eyes, and, at the same time, I began to frantically search for evidence, proofs, and writings that would give me further knowledge of the facts reported in that diary. I went several times to the State Archives of Palermo, to the Regional Library, to the Episcopal Curia; at some point, I was forced to rent a room at the Panormos B&B, a few steps from the Politeama Theatre.
It was from there that, every morning, I looked for some news, some clue, grasping onto the little historical information in the diary. With only a few days left before my return to Lombardy, I never got a break. I quickly set up a vast research network through my contacts in the field of old books and post-Risorgimento Sicilian history.
Rachele Borghese could not take much more of me. She was the young owner of Le pagine d'incanto, in Chiaramonte Gulfi, an antique book shop of which I was and still am an affectionate customer and which on many occasions had supplied me with rare and curious texts on Sicilian history.
I shyly confess that I stressed poor Rachele at all hours of the day and, in some cases, even at night to get news about possible bibliographic discoveries on the subject. I aroused I imagine the wrath and antipathy of the young husband to whom I promised to give a copy of this text as a present, together with a bottle of new olive oil from my land, an apology for my pressing demands.
I entrusted the IT investigation instead to my brotherly friend Salvo Lecce, who spent many nights in Milan on online archives, regional OPACs, and inter-library services searching for data or texts that might be helpful to me. The nightmare was back. I took again a path bristling with brambles and nettles, but this time it was not the rage of a wild sow that was chasing me but the thirst for truth.
I only hoped that I would not slip again because I knew perfectly well how treacherous the ground of history was.
A DIFFERENT GOSPEL
The hidden diary was preceded, in turn, by a short incipit written by a female hand:
Sister Clara Rosa,
Abbess of the Convent of Santa Agatha of the Daughters of Santa Clara of Assisi in the town of Galati, at the dawn of this new year 1866 AD., I place here the writings that I was given to keep, in memory of the courageous deeds of Giovanni Darco. He was condemned in absentia by the laws of the Kingdom of Italy for rebelry, sedition and desertion, murder and theft, and gang robbery since 1863 and still vehemently wanted in these mountains and elsewhere.
Like a dear and secret son, I take care to keep it as an everlasting testimony of the real facts that happened and that I understood through direct words and also through the words of others as they really happened and not as history has written, keeping my word to hand down the memory of a human battle of a son of this land of Galati, that bravely opposed the new occupation of old masters, that now threaten also our sacred vows and ecclesiastical institutions, without fear of human judgment and even more of that of God to which they will one day submit unavoidably.
It happened that in the past year, around the third ten days of April the Bersaglieri6 posted in the streets of this city and around it an edict announcing the final liberation of the Nebrodi Mountains from the band of the rebel Giovanni Darco. He had kept at bay the military of the new kingdom for more than two years, at the point to require the presence on the island of a military delegation from Piedmont.
This dispatch, published widely and posted as a threat and a warning on the walls of all the towns in the district, read:
The Royal Delegation congratulates the Royal Carabinieri, the Bersaglieri, and all the faithful and honest people who, since the birth of the rogue band of outlaws headed by the rebel Giovanni Darco and created by him, have served the Sovereign King and the Constituted Authority. The perseverance and invaluable courage of the soldiers finally overcame the criminal gang nesting in the Nebrodi hills. The fugitives and their associates have until the end of the tenth day from the date of this proclamation and the opportunity to surrender unarmed and in peace. After this period has elapsed without success, the remaining perpetrators, and those of them who are subsequently arrested and sentenced will be sentenced to death by public hanging.
Even within these strong and sacred walls, the echoes of those words also displayed at the entrance of the Mother Church reached me, and, the following night, I recited a prayer for the victims' souls of both factions.
A few days later, when the priests of some neighbouring churches had gathered at the Church of the Assumption7 and waters settled a little, Don Nofrio Cletofonte, archpriest of Nicosia, also a wanted man, sneaked up on me and, asking to see me to my astonishment , placed this diary in my hands, affirming that I was chosen by God and the author to receive, keep and protect it. Eight days later, the archpriest was taken by the Bersaglieri and shot in the public square with twelve other rebels. I guarded this booklet with delight and curiosity and read it all in one breath in my room.
Now that I fear for my life and feel my end near, I have decided to protect it here, hidden among the letters to the Galatians, as tracers of the real events that took place in the land of Galàti, of a brave fight for freedom, hoping that one day it will be held in honest hands. They will finally bear immortal witness to the light of truth against the sad darkness of lies.