Sommaria

NAPLES AND THE SOMMARIA'S CONSULTE
I arrived in Naples from Berkeley, California, in September 1972 to do research for my Ph. D. dissertation. To tell the truth, I was not quite prepared for the city where I was to live for the next three years. I was fluent in Italian, but I could understand not a word of the Neapolitan dialect I heard everywhere, every day. I had of course read of the great miracles of S. Gennaro, which I knew took place twice a year, in May and September, and a third time if necessary. But I was somewhat taken aback to see the banner headlines in an afternoon paper that September declaiming that the miracle had indeed taken place, on schedule.

Needless to say, the Berkeley I had left was a very different town from Naples, and I must say that at first I was quite bewildered by the new city --- by the noise, the general animation of things, the negotiations one had to learn to undertake with drivers every time one crossed a street, the traffic in the old section of town, in Spaccanapoli, which had me wondering every morning when I went to the archive and every evening when I left it.

Back in Berkeley, I had worked hard on a Neapolitan topic in a research seminar, and I was of course well acquainted with the literature on matters social, economic and fiscal for early modern Naples. But again, I was not prepared for the enormous wealth of sources in the State Archive, with the task of finding and then creating, almost literally, something ex nihilo from the stacks of bundles I could see in the consultation rooms.

Even worse (I thought at the time), I did not find the materials I thought I would quickly get hold of and, to my horror, I soon realized that another scholar was working on the very same documents I had requested, on the very same area I had chosen to write about, public finance in the Kingdom in the early modern period. In light of those developments, I took a decision that, in retrospect, was to prove very useful. I set about reading the consulte from the Regia Camera della Sommaria, so as to give myself (though I didn't consciously know this when I started) training in the archives, in early modern Southern Italian history and in the city where I was now living.

I had read bits of the Sommaria's consulte back in Berkeley when I had first read Professor Galasso's works, and I had seen from the notes to the articles in Mezzogiorno medievale e moderno, for example, how informative those documents could be. I thought that reading them would bring me closer to the far-away world of early modern Naples.

So in my first nine months in Naples, I sat in the old sala diplomatica and read one volume of consulte after the other. Some of those documents were of course obscure; some were not immediately easy to fathom, but soon I developed a basic understanding of issues and procedure and I grew quite attached to the texts, the scribes even, whom I could imagine penning those words so long ago. Historical recreation of course involves a strong exercise of the imagination, and perhaps as I lived in sixteenth-century Naples during the work day and in its twentieth-century counterpart the rest of the time, the two towns began to merge in my mind. So I was soon struck by what I saw as a profound continuity between the city I read about every day and the city I walked in the rest of the time ---- say, of traffic disputes among coaches going in opposite directions in the narrow streets not far from the archive in the sixteenth century, or of men who sold contraband tobacco unloaded from the galleys in the harbor, or of the hapless soul who sought to cash a check in 1580 and who spent a whole day going from to another and then another of ten different banks, only to find himself at the day's end in the one where he had started. (Actually, though I didn't know it then, something very similar was to happen to me on my second trip to Naples, in 1983, and of course the experience burned that document [not a consulta that one time] in my mind....) So, for better or worse, the consulte helped me understand Naples, and Naples helped me understand the consulte.

From the beginning, I had started taking notes on the documents I read, for I thought that might be useful later on, too, when I would write my dissertation. So for every single consulta I read, I jotted down the date, the folios and a brief summary, often aided by the very summaries the scribes had placed at the end of nearly every document. I did this on long sheets of paper (fogli protocollo) and by the beginning of the summer of 1973 I had compiled a sort of repertory of every document in the first fifty volumes of the series Consulte della Sommaria, from about 1539 to about 1648.

That proved to be an extremely worthwhile use of time. Back in Berkeley, when I was writing my dissertation, and then in San Antonio, when I was writing my book and my articles in the general field of early modern finance in Naples, those old repertories proved themselves invaluable time and time again, as they still do, to this day, to me and the very few friends with whom I have shared them. In a matter of minutes, even without the accoutrements of search functions that a computerized text would have provided, I could find every item the Sommaria had written about between 1539 and 1648, relating, say, to grain, or to population, or to taxes, or to fiscal exemptions ---- in other words, to every single issue about which that magistracy had rendered an opinion.

I am now making those repertories available online, in the hope that they will be as useful to other scholars as they have been to me in the last thirty-odd years. As I do so, I remember with great gratitude Professor Giuseppe Galasso, who, before 1972, first showed me the riches that lay in the Sommaria's consulte and who, in the years since, has been a constant source of encouragement in my work on early modern Naples.

I dedicate this work with with profound sadness and with unchanged affection to David Gordon LoRomer (1939-2004), whom I first met in Dwinelle Hall, in Berkeley, in the far-away month of September, 1964, and who became, over these last forty years, my brother, my friend.

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With the general repertories I am making available also a list of consulte dealing with venality of office in the Kingdom from 1539 to 1648. I had compiled that list a very long time ago, before computers revolutionized research and record keeping. I then misplaced the list and would never have been able to resurrect it had it not been for the good services of my good friend Piero Ventura, who quickly came to the rescue with a copy of the original text. My warm thanks to him, to Letizia Cortini as well as to the inseparable trio, Merlino Maschiaccio, P. Mini and Don Bartolomeo.

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Antonio Calabria
Cavaglione@yahoo.com
San Antonio, Texas
September, 2003/April, 2004

P.S. I plan to put online the repertories for volumes 1-70 of the Sommaria's consulte, adding each volume as I am able to get it typed. If at all possible, eventually I would like to extend the repertory to volume 103, covering the entire period of Spanish rule in Naples.

The reader may find that at times I have left a date, or part of a date (ordinarily the day) blank. Usually that's because a digit in the date was not clear to me when I first read it. Since I don't have all the consulte microfilmed, and have had to rely for the most part on the notes I took in 1972-73, I have decided to carry on in any case.

I would be grateful to anyone who might catch the occasional error that may have slipped in despite my best efforts and email me at Cavaglione@yahoo.com. In the texts, I have made no major attempt at changing the language into modern Italian or at achieving a modern consistency in the spelling of names.

If readers find the information in this site useful, they may want to visit www.donationjunction.com and click on the charity sites there grouped, at no cost to themselves.

Regia Camera Della Sommaria, Napoli Consulte Inventario Antonio Calabria

Regia Camera Della Sommaria, Napoli
Consulte
Inventario

Antonio Calabria