The Library in Zagreb

«I De Franceschi legano da subito la loro storia a quella della Società e per tre generazioni si spendono per essa.» The De Franceschi tie their history to the Society's from the first, and for three generations spend themselves on it. Carlo (1809–1893) promoter, then president 1886–1889. Camillo director from 1923 and president from 1935, editor of its «Atti e Memorie». Carlo the younger (1900–1972), a member who wrote for it. A family archive and a learned society's archive that cannot fully be separated — the inventory says so in as many words.

«Nel 1944 si trasferì a Venezia, salvando quanto poteva del patrimonio della Società.» In 1944 he moved to Venice, saving what he could of the Society's patrimony. He was seventy-six. That is why a substantial part of the Istrian historical record survives at all, and it is the reason the papers of this family and the papers of that society are tangled together in the same boxes.

«Documenti e fotografie strettamente personali appartenenti a diversi membri della famiglia, in particolare a Italo, figlio di Camillo, nato nel 1906 e morto, appena cinquantenne, nel 1957. Questi rievocò in alcuni saggi l'opera del padre.» Italo, son of Camillo, born 1906, dead in 1957 barely fifty, who wrote essays recalling his father's work. Note he is not the Ing. Italo de Franceschi of the Umag tablet, who died in 1944 aged sixty-eight — two men of the name in two branches, a generation apart.

«Si sono trovate anche carte relative alla famiglia Bembo, imparentata con i De Franceschi attraverso il matrimonio di Caterina con Carlo nel 1933.» Papers of the Bembo family, related to the De Franceschi through the marriage of Caterina to Carlo in 1933. This site already carries the Bembo of Gologorica; here is the join, with a year on it.

German gymnasium at Pisino, then the commercial and nautical academy at Trieste; a member of the Circolo Garibaldi and an irredentist demonstrator. Implicated in the explosion of a device at the unveiling of a monument to Trieste's 1889 dedication to Austria, he was sentenced to two years' hard imprisonment at Gradisca. Then the Biblioteca Civica at Trieste directly under Attilio Hortis, and after 1929 the provincial library and archaeological museum at Pola. «Fu un eccellente medioevalista.» The bomb and the prison are not on this site anywhere.

A series of thirty-one drawings of decorated initials, made for Caprin's «Il Trecento a Trieste» (Trieste 1897). Caprin himself states in the book that they are Giulio's. The letters are copied from a medieval parchment of the Statutes of Trieste of 1350, then in the city's Archivio diplomatico. So a man from a hill village in the county of Pazin spent a season copying fourteenth-century capitals out of a Trieste statute book, letter by letter.

Caprin's «L'Istria nobilissima» (1905–07) carries Giulio's drawings too, along with the landscapes, village views, peasant figures and archaeological objects he made for «Le Alpi Giulie», «Pianure friulane» and «Marine istriane». These are documentary drawings — a draughtsman sent to look at a thing and record it — which makes them a visual record of the Istria the family actually lived in, made by one of them.

A drawing of the seal of the Triestine Arcadian academy founded in 1784, made as the headpiece for Camillo de Franceschi's essay «L'Arcadia romano-sonziaca e la Biblioteca civica di Trieste» of 1929–30. Giulio drew the ornament for Camillo's scholarship. Two of Carlo's sons, working on the same page, thirty years after their father's death.

Civici Musei di Storia ed Arte, Trieste — Civico Museo Sartorio, Gabinetto dei disegni e delle stampe. The entries are in the Friuli Venezia Giulia regional heritage catalogue (patrimonioculturale.regione.fvg.it), several with digital images of the sheets. The portal refuses connections from this project's network, so the individual sheet records have been read only at second hand, through the catalogue's public summaries. That is a gap and it is named as one.

«Testamenti polesani del secolo XV, con alcuni cenni sulle antiche casate patrizie di Pola», *Atti e memorie della Società istriana di archeologia e storia patria*, vol. 42 (1930), pp. 167–219. Volume 39 of the Rovinj *Atti* pointed at this without a date; here it is dated and paginated. Fifteenth-century Pula wills transcribed, with an account of the old patrician houses of the city — and this archive has just opened a southern-Istrian cluster centred on Pula that it cannot place. Fifty-two pages, in a journal that is largely digitised.

«La popolazione di Pola nel secolo XV e nei seguenti», *Archeografo Triestino* ser. 3, vol. 3 (1906), pp. 221–315. Ninety-four pages on who actually lived in Pula from the fifteenth century onward. Camillo wrote the two standard studies of the population and the patriciate of the city where this archive's unplaced cluster lives, and wrote them a century before the question came up here.

«Quando e da chi sia stato ideato l'apocrifo istrumento di confinazione della Contea di Pisino con la data del 1325», *Archivio Veneto* ser. 5, vols. 30/31 (1942), pp. 104–111. This site published, an hour ago, that Mikula Gologorički, parish priest of Gologorica, wrote the Croatian Glagolitic version of the Istrian Boundary Settlement of 1325 — one of the founding documents of Croatian literacy, from this family's own village. Camillo De Franceschi, of that village and that family, wrote a paper arguing that the instrument is apocryphal — asking when it was invented, and by whom. Both things are on this site now, and they should be read together.

«I Castelli della Val d'Arsa. Ricerche storiche. Con documenti inediti e alberi genealogici» (Parenzo 1900, 246 pp., offprinted from AMSI XIV–XV) — the castles of the Val d'Arsa, the country immediately south-east of Gologorica, with unpublished documents and genealogical trees; it was his first book, written at thirty. And «Ricordi di biblioteca», *Archeografo triestino* ser. 4, XXII (1959), pp. 3–76 — seventy-four pages of library recollections, which is where the man who bought the Nobile drawings at Koper in 1934 and 1941, and who shelved books carrying the ex libris «De Franceschi – Seghetto», would have written about doing it.

Five parts on the Castropola and the commune of Pula, 1902–04. Seven parts of the *Chartularium piranense*, the medieval charters of Piran, 1924–38. Dante at Pola twice, in 1906 and 1932. The Florentine exiles of Dante's company lending money in Trieste and Istria, 1938. *Le nazionalità in Istria*, Trieste 1938 — the year that title meant what it meant. Then, after the war and the loss of the province, Capodistria's origins, a memoir of Giovanni Timeus and Pola's journalism, the statutes of Piran, and at the last the «Storia documentata della contea di Pisino», published at Venice in 1964, edited by his son Carlo — the county his own family came out of, finished by the next generation.

Jakov Jelinčić, «Knjiga ređenja u Pićnu (Prothocollum) (1632.–1783.)», DAPA Posebna izdanja sv. 37, 2015. This archive has priests it cannot place. Gian Mattia Defranceschi, whom the visitation of 1788 calls «parroco Mattia Defranceschi» of Gologorica and who signs the register «Ego Joannes Mathias Franceschi». Presbiter Philippus de Franceschi, celebrating a baptism at Gallignana on 19 March 1734. Gian Matteo, son of Gian Pietro, parish priest at Moncalvo and canon of the cathedral of Pedena. Petar Kruzila, archpriest of Gologorica, dead 1731. An ordination register names a man's father when he is ordained. A hundred and fifty years of Pedena ordinations, in one printed volume, for twenty euro.

Elvis Orbanić (ed.), «Ignacije Kajetan Buzetski — duhovna vizitacija iz 1788. godine u Istri / Ignazio Gaetano de Buset, Visita spirituale del 1788 in Istria», Quaderni di «Archiva Ecclesiae» 13, Città del Vaticano 2016, 477 pp., ISBN 978-953-7640-30-9; co-published by the Hrvatski državni arhiv and DAPA. The Vatican's ecclesiastical archivists' association took a non-Italian member's book for the first time to print it. It is de Buset's parish-by-parish visitation of the diocese of Pićan between 31 March and 31 August 1788 — the last year of the diocese — and it covers Gologorica and Gallignana. Translated by Jakov Jelinčić and Elvis Orbanić, both of whom are already on this project's list of people to write to, and both of whom work at Pazin.

Danijela Doblanović Šuran and Marija Mogorović Crljenko, «Matična knjiga krštenih župe Umag (1483.–1643.)», sv. 46, 2019. This is the direct test of a problem published on this site today. The parish church of Umag holds a canvas of 1650 carrying the arms of the De Franceschi of Umag — nineteen years before the family is supposed to have reached Istria from Crete. Either the arms were added later by a donor, or the name was already at Umag. A hundred and sixty years of Umag baptisms, edited and printed, ending seven years before that painting, will say which.

Milena Joksimović (ed.), «Apostolska vizitacija Pulske biskupije biskupa Augustina Valiera 1580. godine», 2023. The most expensive on the list and the one aimed at the biggest hole. This archive has just opened a southern-Istrian cluster — thirty-one people at Pula, Fažana, Premantura, Medulin, Ližnjan and Barban, in the registers from 1667 — and cannot say where it came from. Valier's visitation is eighty-seven years earlier and goes parish by parish through exactly that country.

«Urbar Pazinske knežije 1571.–2021.», zbornik radova, sv. 56, 2023. This site argues at length about Gologorica's absence from the roll of 1498 and Carlo's explanation of it — «perchè ne era Dominus il vescovo di Pedena». The next roll is the one to read, and this is the volume of studies published for its 450th anniversary.

Mirela Slukan Altić, «Katastar Istre» (2001) — the cadastral history of the peninsula, which is what stands behind every property this archive tries to locate. And Biserka Budicin and Maja Milovan, «Genealoška istraživanja za početnike (primjer prakse Državnog arhiva u Pazinu)» (sv. 59, 2024) — the archive's own handbook to doing genealogy in its own holdings, which is the cheapest way to find out what else it has.

Dražen Vlahov, «Glagoljski rukopis iz Huma (1608.–1639.): iz Registro della chiesa parrocchiale di Colmo», DAPA, Glagoljski rukopisi 3 / Posebna izdanja sv. 13, 1999, 166 pages. This one is here because of a coincidence that may not be one. The oldest object in this family's own archive — fond HR-DARI-254 at Rijeka — is «the income book of the parish church at Hum, 1610–1685, written in Glagolitic», the only Croatian-language item in the whole fond. And the State Archive in Pazin published, in 1999, a Glagolitic register of the parish church of Colmo — which is Hum — running 1608 to 1639.** Overlapping decades, the same parish, the same script, the same kind of book. They may be one manuscript, or two parts of one register that were separated, or genuinely two books. Nobody has said, because the fond description and the edition do not cite each other. Thirteen euro settles it — and if it is the same book, then the oldest thing this family ever collected has been in print, in full, for twenty-seven years, and nobody noticed.

Sv. 23, «Pićanska biskupija i pićanština» (2012) is marked *rasprodano* — sold out. So is Škunca's «Prošlost Crkve u Istri». Those are library requests rather than purchases.

In the list of possidenti e privati — the men of property and private means, the section a nineteenth-century directory keeps for those who do not need a trade beside their name: «Defranceschi Corrado, controllore in pens., V. Caserma 12.» Corrado Defranceschi, a retired controller, of via Caserma 12. *Controllore* is a grade in the imperial financial and customs service, and a pensioned one in that list is a man who ended respectably. He is the first person of this surname this archive can put at a street number in Trieste.

In the register of firms: «Gleyre Costante (Enrico de Franceschi), in manifatture e pece, V. S. Spiridione 7.» The house trades as Gleyre Costante; the man behind the name in brackets — which is how the directory gives the principal or the manager — is Enrico de Franceschi. The trade is manifatture e pece, textiles and pitch, and the address is via San Spiridione 7, in the commercial quarter behind the Canal Grande. Cloth and ship's pitch in one business is an Adriatic port's ordinary pairing.

«Franceschinelli Maria, Androna Romagna 4» and «Defrancesco Giac., via Madon. 26», the latter an employee in active service in a city office. Different formations of the same root — Franceschinelli and Defrancesco — and recorded here so that the next search does not stop at them.

Trieste is where the Istrian and Fiume families were going in the second half of the nineteenth century, and where Camillo De Franceschi would live, work and keep his archive. Nothing in the book joins Corrado or Enrico to any line on this site. What the book does is establish that in 1869 there were two households of the name living and trading in the city, at addresses that can be walked to, twenty years before Camillo got there. The directories for other years would say whether they stayed.

The Corsica question, answered from the inside. A Venezuelan historian's history of his own family, and it is the Corsican branch entire. They came from Ersa in Cap Corse — the long northern finger of the island, with its hamlets Cocinco, Botticella, Granaggiolo, Piazza and Poggio — a place whose name is said to come from *arsia*, burnt, because the land was dry and poor and never held two thousand people; so they lived off the sea or they left. The first generation is Pietro Franceschi, 29 June 1694 – 12 February 1771, then Gasparo (1721–1799), Francesco Maria (1750–1828), Pietro (1789–1871), and Simone, born at Ersa 11 March 1826 and dead there 25 March 1907, who married Caroline Mattei and whose son François Marie went to Venezuela and died at Miranda in Carabobo in 1918. They married Dominici, Mattei, Pietri, Antoni, Giuli, Bonavita, Morazzani, Casabianca, Bonifacio, Colombani, Potentini and Cervini. The road out ran through the French Caribbean — Puerto Rico, Saint Thomas, Trinidad, Haiti — and then to Venezuela; there is a *Centro de Arte Alejandro Franceschi* at Yauco and a village in Puerto Rico called Córcega. Nothing in ninety pages touches Istria. This archive's Lines page already says Corsica is not this family; here is the proof, written by a Franceschi.

Every hit is Camillo De Franceschi cited as the authority on Pula — Carlo's son, of this archive's own Gologorica family — and it hands over a bibliography this site did not have: «La popolazione di Pola nel secolo XV e nei seguenti» (*Archeografo Triestino*, ser. III vol. III fasc. 2, 1907); «L'antica abbazia di S. Maria del Canneto in Pola» (AMSI XXXIX, 1927); «Dante a Pola» (AMSI XLIV, 1932); «Alcuni cenni sugli antichi monasteri femminili di Pola» (AMSI LV, 1954). And one that matters more than the others: «Testamenti polesani del secolo XV con alcuni cenni sulle antiche casate patrizie di Pola» — sixteen fifteenth-century Pula wills, transcribed by Camillo, with an account of the old patrician houses of the city. This archive has just opened a southern-Istrian cluster centred on Pula and cannot say where it came from. Camillo went through Pula's fifteenth-century wills a century ago. That is the next thing to read, and it was written by a cousin.

Not about the family, and full of it. Camillo De Franceschi bought the Nobile drawings for the Provincial Library in two purchases, 1934 and 1941, from heirs who were keeping them at Koper; he wrote the collection's title on its cover, *Viaggio artistico attraverso l'Istria*; the whole collection has recently been digitised at the Državni arhiv u Rijeci. Giulio De Franceschi appears throughout as an illustrator and documentarist of monuments, and the author judges his drawings of Pula's Golden Gate and of Poreč more informative than Nobile's own. And one sentence is a find in itself: the author says that reading in that library's holdings he repeatedly came upon the ex libris «De Franceschi – Seghetto» — books from the country house at Seget, the Cretan family's own library, sitting on the shelves of a public collection in Istria.

A very large collection of essays. The hits are bibliographical — Carlo and Camillo cited among the Istrian historians — with a heavy Omiš presence (158 mentions) that belongs to the Dalmatian family's town rather than to any document about them.

Archaeology of the pre-Roman Histri. The surname occurs only in the apparatus. Useful for the deep background of the peninsula and nothing else.

544 mentions of Umag and nine of the surname — the Seget family's own town, but the hits are references rather than records. Worth reading properly for the Cretan branch, and not yet read.

The standard account of Venetian Istria and the repopulation this family arrived in. Cited already on this site; now held in full.

Eight hundred and twelve mentions of Carnia and only six of the surname — which is itself informative. A surname study of the Carnian valleys that does not make much of this name, in the region this archive's own family is said to come from.

Ferdinand Hauptmann, an archivist at the Conservation Institute in Zagreb, was sent by the Ministry of Education in 1945–46 to tour Istria and Kvarner and identify and save archival material. He went to the De Franceschi house at Gologorica — «Gola Gorica» in his report — and found the material thrown out of the cupboards and scattered on the floor. The district people's committee of Čepić had already taken the furniture. The family fond and parts of the collections survived anyway. On 12 August 1945, on three sheets of paper, he wrote a report on the state and contents of the private library and archive, on how the early post-war authorities had dealt with the family's archive and property, and on the family's scholarly and collecting work. That report exists. It is published in Leideck (2015), and it is the last description of this library standing in the house it was made in.

The books went to Zagreb. Branko Tomečak's history of bequests in the NSK's holdings records that in 1949 the University Library received over 1,500 titles from the so-called «Istrian depot» — reports, and works on politics, economics, history and literature. No official document of the transfer exists, and the librarians say only that one can be all but certain this is the material out of Gologorica, travelling the same road as the archives that went to Rijeka.

The boxes went into the store. Each book had a number pencilled inside the front wrapper, and many carried the signatures of members of the family, sometimes with a date. When the library moved from Marulićev trg to its present building the boxes moved with it — and «the material was not included in the NSK's holdings and nobody could know of its existence». It was not in the card catalogue, and later it was not in the electronic one either. Processing began after more than sixty years. The first bibliographic record was entered on 15 May 2009. A second phase ran through 2014. The last of the material was begun on 20 January 2021, and by the end of that year 2,396 units had been listed.

58 serials and 2,338 monographs, spanning 1503 to 1945. Mostly nineteenth and early twentieth century; history predominates; the language is mostly Italian. The oldest book is an Aldine: Constantinus Lascaris, De octo partibus orationis liber primus, printed at Venice by Aldus Manutius in 1503. Then Sannazaro's Arcadia, Naples 1504; the Statuta Bassanensa, Venice 1506; Machiavelli's collected works of 1550; and Petrarch with Sebastiano Fausto's commentary.

In his Memorie autobiografiche, in a letter written at Pazin on 28 April 1883, Carlo describes his schooldays: «During my gymnasium days I read on my own the works of Metastasio, Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto and Berni, having found them in the family, and I learned to scan Italian verse.» The librarians went looking, and found them: two works of Metastasio, three of Petrarch, one Tasso, one Ariosto, and an anthology containing Berni. The actual books a boy took down off his family's shelves at Gologorica in the 1820s are in boxes in Zagreb, cataloguéd, with numbers. He also names Vittorelli and Manzoni's Inni Sacri; those are not in the collection, only a life of Manzoni.

The paper reproduces the autographs found in the books: Gian Pietro, Carlo, Virginia, Camillo and Massimiliano De Franceschi. And the collection carries other men's ex libris, because Carlo bought and was given from the libraries of the Istrian antiquaries he worked among — Tomaso Luciani of Labin, the lawyer and politician Antonio Scampicchio, the historian Pietro Kandler. There are dedications to members of the family from Kandler himself, and from the Hungarian historian Aládar Fest, gymnasium director at Rijeka.

Among the books the librarians found manuscript family material, texts on parchment, personal documents, notebooks, accounts, postcards, posters and proclamations. Also: Camillo De Franceschi's visiting card from his time at the City Library in Trieste; papers of Francesco Basilio and of Dott. Antonio Suttora of Trieste; hand-written poems by Giuseppina Martinuzzi, one of them a patriotic poem dedicated to Camillo; work of Silvio Benco; and letters of Gabriele D'Annunzio and of Tomaso Luciani.

Told plainly, and it is hard to read: after «its turbulent journey, unsuitable storage and keeping», much of the material is damaged. There are insect tracks in the paper, and cats' paw prints; pages faded and warped by damp, or stuck together.

The same paper tidies up something this archive had half-right. The family's things are now in five places: the National and University Library, Zagreb — the books; the State Archive in Rijeka, fond HR-DARI-254 — the papers; the State Archive in Pazin, which also holds a De Franceschi family fond; the University Library in Pula, whose Collection of Old Books and Manuscripts holds Carlo De Franceschi's correspondence; and whatever is in the bundle DARI returned to the Naučna biblioteka in Pula in 1950.

On the merging of the fonds, the librarians quote the archivist Ines Krota's finding of 1990 and repeat it in their own words: in the boxes, the fonds of two De Franceschi families had been joined, «koje zajedno nemaju ništa osim istarskog zavičaja i prezimena» — which together have nothing in common but the Istrian homeland and the surname. That is now the third independent statement of the separation this archive argues for: Brhan in the migration literature, the Rijeka finding aid, and a peer-reviewed library-science paper of 2022.