Here, we recount the origin of everything—the starting point of the entire En Route project. It all began with the ex-libris commissioned for the Vatican Library to distinguish all the volumes that once belonged to Cesare Poma, donated to our institution by his mother, Clelia Bona De Fabianis. Dated 1932, it commemorates the premature death of the Biellese consul and the generous gesture of his surviving mother.
With this and other related documents in hand, Eugenia Galateri di Genola, a descendant of Cesare Poma and heir to part of his collections—lively and determined—approached the Vatican Library in recent years to gain insight into her ancestor’s bequest, triggering an internal research effort that turned out to be far more dynamic and full of discoveries than we could have ever imagined!
All of the printed books and journals owned by the consul were found, dispersed across our various collections but all marked with the distinctive red ink ex-libris. Among the manuscripts were the twenty volumes of Poma’s onomastic index (Vat. lat. 14304-14324)—an impressive compilation of thousands upon thousands of index cards in which the Biellese scholar had meticulously recorded Italian surnames, noting their geographical distribution and written attestations. Some entries consist of newspaper obituaries, cut out and edited to highlight only the deceased’s surname and place of reference. Everything appeared to be in order, cataloged, and available for consultation—except for one mysterious collection of newspapers that seemed to have vanished without a trace!
Thanks to the determination and expertise of two colleagues—Andreina Rita and Delio V. Proverbio—the Poma Periodici Collection resurfaced. Not physically, as it had been safely stored on some of our archive shelves, but rather in the institutional consciousness, which had lost track of it among the hundreds of collections that make up our holdings. The reason behind this “disappearance”? Likely the sheer complexity of the collection, containing such an extraordinary variety of languages that cataloging it seemed nearly impossible. Hard to believe? Here is a breakdown of the language families represented in Poma’s newspaper collection (each of which includes multiple variations):
Germanic: 163 specimens, Celtic: 131, Romance: 112, Chinese: 111, Arabic: 104, Slavic: 94, Altaic: 76, Indo-Aryan: 84, Albanian: 32, Ugro-Finnic: 45, Bantu: 24, Baltic: 33, Japanese: 34, Austronesian: 29, Native American: 14, Armenian: 22, Iranian: 11, Polynesian: 13
Among these 1,200 items, there are countless instances where the alphabet does not match the language, requiring catalogers skilled in both aspects. Need proof? Here’s an example: a newspaper printed in Hebrew characters but actually bilingual. It is the December 8, 1899 (= 6 Tevet 5660) issue of جريده لسان: ولتمزن ملتمزن منفعتين خدمت ايدر فني ادبي رسالة, Djeridei-Lissan, ירידיאי ליסאן, printed in Constantinople by Avraham Leon from August 1899 onwards. The two columns feature text in Ottoman Turkish and Ladino—that is, Judeo-Spanish, the language spoken by the descendants of Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 15th century and widely used among Sephardic communities throughout the Mediterranean. Not exactly an easy task to catalog!
Thanks to the support of Maison Dior, we will finally be able to invite researchers and scholars to the Vatican Library to assist us in cataloging this vast collection, with the goal of digitizing it and making it freely accessible to the public on our DVL platform!