Negri da Oleggio Library
A treasure for the study of the Lombard history and culture
The "Negri da Oleggio" fund
The fruit of Count Vincenzo Negri da Oleggio's love for history and culture of Milan and Lombardy, this special collection is held in a palatial room and consists of about 5,500 works divided into a total of 7,500 volumes.
The collection was donated to the Istituto Toniolo di Studi Superiori and has been kept into the Milan campus since 1974.
The jewel of the collection is an original diploma dated 9 January, 1106 bearing the signature of Matilde di Canossa. The document contains a sentence imposed on the Monastery of S. Salvatore of Pavia in settlement of a dispute between the Melara Court of Rovigo and Revere Castle in Mantua.
The collection ranges from works on political history, ecclesiastical history, literary and cultural history, palaeography and diplomacy, genealogy and heraldry and numismatics, as well as other documents and historical sources that have yet to be studied.
The works conserved comprise bans, several Ripamonti editions and classics of Lombard historiography. The collection also conserves 30 manuscripts, an incunabulum, numerous 16th-century books and prestigious editions from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, in addition to the Cipriani collection.
The manuscripts comprise a Passional, most certainly of Milanese origin, which presents the Passio beatissimi Victoris martyris at the beginning of the collection.
The incunabulum sets out Chronica Bossiana, the work of Donato Bossi, while the 16th-century editions boast precious volumes such as the Epistolae et commentarii by Jacopo Piccolomini.
For a scienific evaluation of the collection (in Italian):
The "Silvio Cipriani" fund
In the room of the Library Negri da Oleggio is also preserved a large portion of the library of Oreste († 1919) and Silvio († 1979) Cipriani, donated at the University in 1980. Consists of approximately 1500 titles in printed texts, documents and manuscripts, focused on three main thematic areas:
- the history of Milan and more generally of Lombardy, with early editions of merit
- Milanese fiction, with keen interest in Nineteenth-century novelists
- production Milanese dialect
It also includes a large collection of magazines published in Milan in the late Eighteenth century and early Twentieth century, gathered in 206 volumes and 15 binders of which there is an inventory accompanied by indexes of the directors and editors-printers.
For a scienific evaluation of the collection (in Italian):
To consult the volumes of both funds, please contact the staff of the Giuseppe Billanovich Reference Room.
The enhancement through the reorganisation and the electronic cataloguing
Launched in August 2003 thanks to the support of the CARIPLO Foundation, the reorganisation and cataloguing of the collection in electronic format aimed to complete the substantial work with which Università Cattolica has sought to honour its commitment to enhance the extraordinary collection of Lombard and Milanese history donated in 1968 by Count Vincenzo Negri da Oleggio.
To crown the essential cognitive investigations conducted with the degree theses prepared under the guidance of Professors Valentino Foffano, Mirella Ferrari and Simona Gavinelli, the now-completed project has fulfilled its objective of laying the essential foundations for:
- a better conservation, assured by the reorganization and the complete restoration work on damaged volumes
- a wider accessibility, allowed by the equipment of a modern electronic catalog available on-line from a potentially unlimited community of scholars, using the UCSC OPAC
- an adequate promotion, fostered by the publication during the work of a periodic Bulletin (in Italian) and the presentation of its most prized pieces at exhibitions organized within the University
The accomplishment of the project therefore is a compelling example at national level of the non-intrusive enhancement of an already complete collection based on a tendentiously semantic organisation of the material it contains.
At the same time, the project has laid the important experimental foundations for an innovative model of intervention in the sphere of documentary heritages, that has successfully married the need for conservation with the responsibility of facilitating their use by a vast and ever-growing public.
More info (in Italian):
