Carlo's Book

Antoljak's long study of when and how the Slavs came into Istria cites «C. De Franceschi, L'Istria: note storiche, Parenzo 1879» twenty-one times, at pages 24, 25, 33, 38, 41, 45, 47–49, 52, 57, 59, 60, 62, 64, 66 and 70 — and also his 1852 article «Sulle varie popolazioni dell'Istria» in the Trieste paper «L'Istria». He is quoted for the date Istria fell to Byzantium (539), for Belisarius, for the charter of 1234 that names a «monte Schiavo» opposite Brtonigla, for the road called the «callis sclavonica», for the chronology of the Lombard and Avar raids. He is used exactly as a modern historian uses a nineteenth-century authority: constantly, and never quite trusted.

«…a drugim se navodom De Franceschija da u listini iz iste godine piše Villa Sclavorum de Longera, naprosto ne može poslužiti jer je netočno pročitan i tako iznesen.» — De Franceschi's other citation, that a document of the same year reads Villa Sclavorum de Longera, simply cannot serve, because it was misread and reported that way. The archive should say plainly what that is. It is the same failure this project keeps finding in its own work: a document read at speed, transcribed wrong, and then argued from. Carlo did it in print in 1879 and it was still being corrected ninety years later.

«C. De Franceschi 1885. godine toliko se zaboravlja kada piše da povijest pokazuje da Istra nije bila nikada zauzeta od nekog slavenskog naroda ili da je takav njom vladao.» — In 1885 C. De Franceschi so far forgets himself as to write that history shows Istria was never occupied by any Slav people, nor ruled by one. Antoljak goes on: that although Carlo uses Constantine Porphyrogenitus, he interprets him to suit himself; that he asserts the Croats never crossed the border of Istria and spread only as far as the river «Tarsia» — and that Carlo has confused the Rječina at Rijeka with the Arsia, the Raša, which is a different river eighty kilometres away and the whole point of the argument. This archive has called Carlo the family's historian and leaned on him for the Carnian origin, and will go on doing both. It should also say this. On the national question he was a partisan of the Italian side of a bitter argument, and he was wrong in a way a specialist could demonstrate from the sources he himself was using. Being wrong there does not make him wrong about his own family's origin — a man is a better witness to his great-grandfather's house than to the seventh century. But it is the reason this archive tests him rather than quotes him.

Not all of it is against him. Elsewhere Antoljak calls him «prilično oprezni De Franceschi» — the fairly cautious De Franceschi — for declining to credit an early Slav presence that other writers assert freely. The same man, in the same book, is both the careless reader and the cautious one. That is what a real reputation looks like at a hundred years' distance.

«Le Memorie sono scritte in forma di lettere, ché dall'aprile al dicembre 1883, l'illustre storiografo istriano, già settuagenario, dettava per compiacere al desiderio del figlio Giampietro, morto immaturamente un anno dopo.» The Memoirs are written as letters, dictated between April and December 1883 by the historian, already in his seventies, to satisfy the wish of his son Giampietro — who died prematurely a year later.

On the right-hand tablet of the family tomb at Gologorica, photographed this year: «PIETRO fu CARLO / MAGISTRATO / ROVIGNO 1854 — MONCALVO 1884». Born at Rovigno in 1854, dead at Moncalvo in 1884. A newspaper in Trieste in 1926 and a stone in an Istrian village churchyard, and they say the same thing: the son asked, the father spent nine months dictating his life, and the son was dead within the year. The book exists because of him.

It appeared for the first time in the 1926 volume of the «Archeografo Triestino», the review of the Società di Minerva, edited by Carlo's other son Camillo — who added not only a preface «dove con serenità di storico delinea il ritratto e l'opera del padre», drawing his father's portrait and work with a historian's composure, but over a hundred notes. It was also sold separately by booksellers, which is why copies circulate as a book of about three hundred pages.

An intimate view of Istrian political life from the first decades of the nineteenth century almost to its close. His father and his uncle still held to the old devotion to the Empire; he was the Risorgimento generation. At Graz he read nothing but Italian authors and talked so boldly that his landlady predicted the gallows for him. As a judicial official he was under the eye of the captain of Pisino, Baron Grimschitz. In 1848 the Istrian electors sent him to the Vienna Parliament with Madonizza, Vidulich and Fachinetti; he saw the October revolution, the siege and the bombardment, and «di quei tragici giorni ci dà nelle Memorie una descrizione drammaticissima, che basterebbe essa sola alla fama del libro» — of those tragic days he gives a description dramatic enough on its own to make the book's reputation.

Back at his obscure post in Rovigno he lasted until 1854, when he was thrown out with a pension so poor he could be called destitute. He took refuge at Fiume, living in a generous lawyer's office until 1860, keeping up the historical and archaeological work that had made him Kandler's collaborator. When the constitution was restored, the Diet of Parenzo — «la famosa Dieta del Nessuno», the famous Diet of Nobody, which refused to send deputies to Vienna — called the exile to be its secretary. Offered a rise on his meagre salary, he refused it out of regard for the province's poor finances, and went on living «pur carico di famiglia, nella voluta povertà» — burdened with a family, in chosen poverty. The Government opposed every candidature he stood for.

«Carlo De Franceschi nacque il 1809 in Moncalvo, un umile villaggio della contea di Pisino.» Born 1809 — which is what his own tomb says, MDCCCIX, and what this archive published against a newspaper obituary of 1893 that gave 1810. But the same review has him dying «l'8 gennaio 1898», and that is wrong: he died on 8 January 1893, as the tomb, the obituaries and the whole of this archive agree. The day and month are right and a digit has slipped. Printed sources make this mistake too, which is the point of checking them.

Camillo, on where his father's politics did not come from: «Non le assorbì certo in famiglia, dove tanto il padre Giuseppe che lo zio Giacomo ostentavano sentimenti di tenace attaccamento all'Austria e a Francesco I.» He certainly did not absorb them at home, where both his father Giuseppe and his uncle Giacomo made a show of stubborn attachment to Austria and to Francis I. And then: «Giacomo De Franceschi aveva preso parte attiva alla preparazione dell'insurrezione istriana del 1809 contro i Francesi, soffocata nel sangue», and with two other representatives of the County — the young Triestine Antonio Dietrich, later a lieutenant field marshal, and Ivancich of Pisino — had gone to Rovigno. Giacomo De Franceschi helped prepare the Istrian rising of 1809 against the French, and it was drowned in blood.

«Era nato cittadino francese, tre giorni dopo la cessione della Contea di Pisino alla Francia, ed egli soleva dire scherzosamente d'avere nutrito dalla culla le idee liberali e democratiche della grande Rivoluzione.» He was born a French citizen, three days after the County of Pazin was ceded to France, and used to say jokingly that he had been fed the liberal and democratic ideas of the great Revolution from the cradle. So the man who spent his life asserting the Italianness of Istria was, for the first weeks of it, a subject of Napoleon — and knew it, and made a joke of it.

Camillo opens by saying his father was born «il 16 ottobre 1809». The Gologorica baptism register, which this archive read from the microfilm, gives 17 October 1809, house 17. Camillo's own «three days after the cession» is the tie-breaker: the Treaty of Schönbrunn was signed on 14 October 1809, and three days after that is the 17th, not the 16th. The register stands. A son writing in 1926 was a day out, and his own sentence catches it.

«Furono da lui scritte per compiacere al desiderio e alle insistenti richieste del figlio Gian Pietro, aggiunto giudiziale in Pola, giovane di promettente ingegno e di felici attitudini letterarie, morto immaturamente a trenta anni nel 1884.» Written to satisfy the wish and the insistent asking of his son Gian Pietro, assistant judge at Pola, a young man of promising talent and happy literary gifts, dead prematurely at thirty in 1884. The tomb at Gologorica says PIETRO fu CARLO, MAGISTRATO, Rovigno 1854 — Moncalvo 1884. Thirty exactly. And Camillo adds that Gian Pietro, before he died, left the manuscript to his two brothers.

«Gettate giù in fretta e alla buona, spesso senza ordine e successione cronologica dei fatti, non essendo in origine destinate alla pubblicità, ma considerate come semplici scritti confidenziali di padre a figlio.» Thrown down in haste and plainly, often out of order, never meant for publication — simple confidential writings from a father to a son. Which is why they are worth more than the book he did publish.

«Nato nell'umile sperduto villaggio di Moncalvo, dell'antica Contea di Pisino, in faccia al superbo panorama del Monte Maggiore e della Valle dell'Arsa … mentre a destra si profilano sull'orizzonte i monti di Pedena, Gallignana, Lindaro, con le vette segnate dagli agili campanili veneti di pietra bianca.» Born in the humble lost village of Moncalvo in the old County of Pazin, facing the Monte Maggiore and the Arsa valley, with the hills of Pedena, Gallignana and Lindar on the horizon to the right, their summits marked by slender Venetian bell-towers of white stone. Every place-name in that sentence is a place this archive has been reading registers from.

Coming home from his first year at the gymnasium at Fiume, riding with his father, they stopped at Passo on the Monte Maggiore road with «il parroco Ierbulla di Gallignana, uomo colto e patriotta» — the parish priest of Gallignana, a cultivated and patriotic man — who asked the boy whether he had studied any history. He managed Pola, Nesactium, and a battle near Lovran. The priest told him that among the ancient Istrian cities there was also Faveria, whose remains he said were at Čepić by Lake Arsa. «Queste le mie prime notizie di storia istriana» — these were my first pieces of Istrian history. The historian of Istria got his start from the parish priest of the town whose baptism book this archive has just finished reading.

«Con tutti i suoi talenti ed i suoi meriti, condusse una vita stentata e morì povero.» A family of seven mouths and two sons kept at their studies away from home; eleven years in the service of the Istrian Provincial Committee on twelve hundred florins without a single rise, because he had refused to sign the officials' petition for one, so as not to unbalance the provincial budget. And Baron Federico Grimschitz, captain of Istria, kept a black book of Istrians politically dangerous — «in cui apparivano annotate oltre quattrocento persone», with more than four hundred people entered in it.