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A 1466 contract, the oldest document in the Argentina family archive. Isn’t it just beautiful?
Does a Five Hundred Year Old Archive Matter?
The year Otranto was being sieged and assaulted, Roberto de Argentina was buying land not that far away, in Francavilla Fontana. Solidly anchored there since 1480, my family’s five hundred years permanence in that place is becoming unmoored and pulled apart by tides of modernity, and seemingly destined to disappear in the oblivion of time. Yeah…I know, what an arrogant thing to write. Who cares? To whom does it matter what happened to a privileged family that rose to prominence in a time of feudalism and rode that horse all the way to the 20th century, at which point it became tired, weary, and unimaginative about its future. Why bother with the centuries long past of a single family, and what need is there to save all those things that it dragged along to the present and stored in an enormous house, like a child who at the sight of an incoming storm hurries to bring inside the accumulation of all the random objects that were used for the day’s play; the detritus of lives from centuries past contained within ancient walls.
All that in my youth had seemed immutable in the town of Francavilla is no longer so. More about why that is, later, but why should I even care since I no longer live there? The thing is…the knowledge that the written words of my ancestors are in a room where I can go visit them and ask them silent questions and receive in response equally quiet invitations to – go ahead, look around, read, maybe you’ll learn something – is a temptation that is hard to resist. I have a need to acknowledge what is in that room before it all dissipates and disappears, or before I do, and fades into that murky past that can no longer be consulted.
Like photographs, letters and documents give us the delusion of knowledge, the appearance of understanding, but they are just frozen frames of lives and times. We just supplement them with our imagination and some contextual knowledge, but we don’t really ever know, do we? Yet we continue on and seek to interpret and understand that strange country, the past, and try to find its connective tissues with our present lives, be those connections long or short. My ancestors’ bones may be stored in metal boxes in a catacomb twenty feet below the ground, but there are strings, and not just DNA strings, that I feel still connect me to those lives.
Francavilla Fontana is my hometown, and there is there a large old building through which I could walk with my eyes closed and could navigate all of its innumerable rooms. It’s been in the family for some generations and contains among its impressive collection of objects, artifacts, and books – attics, rooms, cellars, and garages full of that stuff – it contains an archive with documents that reach back to the late 1400s, the time my family first arrived in Francavilla. The archive is considered, according to at least one newspaper report, the oldest and most thorough in Salento, and is important enough to have been ‘vincolato’, bound, to the National Archives in Naples. It is held by our family, but it has now become part of the patrimony of the state, and to some remote closet of the state it will probably be placed – think closing scene of the original ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ – if it cannot be maintained. It matters to me that the archive remains whole, as it also matters that it eventually become accessible. There are five hundred years of personal correspondence, business contracts, last wills, permits, even some papal indulgences, all from a region that has received modest academic attention; they should be available to future historians of Salento.
At the street level of the building, called ‘lu palazzu tu li baroni’, the house of the barons in the Francaiddese dialect, after entering through a massive door large enough for the carriages of the past, is a series of connected garages and studios that contain a collection of ancient farming implements: horse-drawn carts, metal sheets for sorting potatoes by size, grain scythes, old torque presses for olives made out of olive wood, large clay vessels for olive oil, and every other local historical agricultural relic imaginable. Those have all been accumulated there by my cousin, who grew up in that house and still lives in it. It belonged to his dad, Nicola, the oldest Argentina brother of my dad’s generation, and the nominal baron, and before that to our grandparents. Nicola became a doctor and had his clinic and offices on the bottom floor of the building, which are now full of all those discarded objects my cousin keeps gathering. My cousin’s work is tireless and somewhat thankless, preserving beautiful objects that were the everyday tools of generations past, tools that have a beauty and honesty that is rarely found in objects today. Tools that were handled by farmhands who before the 20th century worked their land the same way for centuries. He has created a museum that is a wonder of local artisanship. The building when originally built incorporated much older and cruder habitations from earlier times, abodes occupied by men who labored as craftsmen and women who labored to run their families, living more modest lives than those who would live in the big building. During those lives people made meals, people slept, people prayed, people loved, and people raised children, people were born and people died, with few of them ever questioning why some were born to live upstairs and some downstairs. It just was so. Many of those primitive rooms remain to this day as underground mazes, now themselves full of objects of much cultural and historical value, but also volumes of things of dubious collectible purpose.
The living quarters for the Argentina family are upstairs and are reached through a wide two floored staircase whose stone steps have had their edges softened by almost two centuries of shoes; mine and those of my cousins when we were children, and those of our parents when they were children, and those of our grandparents and their parents, and of those of all who visited. All contributed to the erosion of those steps, now smooth and soft and without hard edges, stone worn down by family coming home and family leaving. As kids we considered ourselves ‘big’ when we could finally race up and down doubling up on steps. It’s an awe filled experience for me to still be able to go up and down those same steps I navigated as a child. Each time I visit, submerged memories of childhood unexpectedly float unannounced to my conscious thoughts. Things I had forgotten. And when I stand still and focus, I can hear the shrill voices of me and my cousins from back then and feel the feelings I had as a child; I can transport myself to my childhood time there. I think of that verse in 1 Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things”. I often miss the child.
On the first floor, second floor to us in the U.S., there are rooms with dozens of bookshelves filled with books stacked two deep, one row in front of the other. Like a librarian or an antiquarian bookseller, my cousin knows where each book is located. On the walls of the large central rooms on each wing there are paintings of generations of family members. Objects that have accumulated since the house was first inhabited in the mid-1800s fill every table, corner, drawer, and closet. In most areas of the house, any desire for organization has been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the trail of the family’s history. Off to the side of one of the private living rooms – as opposed to the main living room where guests were entertained – there is a private chapel with a small altar. Chapels were found in many of the large noble houses of the past, and priests, sometimes family members would come to officiate over private masses. Our chapel is crowded with many small religious paintings and reliquary statues of saints who have been assigned the responsibility, for one reason or another, to look over our family. They demand attention if they are to fulfill their protective duties.
On the roof of the building, where in other parts people may have built pigeon coops, our family enlisted into service quarters that store further collections of books, many of which are leftover printings of unsold publications written by family members, medical manuals from decades past, legal journals, stuff. From that roof the gorgeous cupola of the cathedral seems within reach on one side, and from its opposite, the ancient castle sits just a block away, as the house was built on an old street that led directly to the castle’s front gate. It mattered once that proximity, a symbol of status, a sign of the prestige the family acquired through its history. The family is now trying to hold on to that history by keeping it in its possession. The part of that history I care about the most, the family archive, is located in one of the very back rooms behind one of my cousins’ kitchen and pantry space. In that remote room is where the archive with five centuries of documents is located.
If I were to convey what researching through that house and archive feels like, I would describe it so: it’s not really like this, but for effect, think of it as an ‘Escape Room’ crammed with shelves and cabinets, full of...the past. It’s overwhelming. It’s hard to get a sense of all the rooms, or which to go in first. It’s hard to know what to look for. The cabinets are not always organized in neat order, though sometimes they are. When opened they may be full of documents or other ephemera from a particular period and place, but other people have been through them already, sometimes carefully, other times haphazardly with little care for their contents. Someone may have moved some of the content to other shelves and never put them back, boxes may have been thrown out, some contents here and there have been damaged. When I sit down and start looking through one of those cabinets, I will find some documents relevant to my search, but often not enough of them. More are needed to get a better understanding, but they are not in that cabinet. Maybe they are in some other cabinet. Sometimes there are notes written by others who have already looked through them and wanted to be useful and leave some thoughts for the next person. The notes help sometimes, but at other times they are factually wrong, or make misguided conclusions about the contents. Hard to know what’s useful from those notes, but they are something, because it takes time to go through even one of those cabinets, so many things in them.
I may find papers and documents about, and by, people who lived in their times not thinking about history, they were just living their lives, they were getting marriage certificates, writing last wills, signing contracts for property exchanges, annotating collected taxes, getting hunting licenses, writing letters to friends and all the other records that a society produces as it carries on with its mundane existence. Other people left no traces at all as their lives may have had no need to have anything recorded, or were deemed not important enough by past curators of the archive. I may find a particularly intriguing trove of documents specific to my search and will get bogged down looking through it, but even after spending considerable time with that promising find, I am unsatisfied because there is no beginning or end to the story; it connects to other stories, yet unexplored. Sometimes where those other stories are to be found is known, other times not so. They may have been dissolved by time, may have been neglected and abandoned, may have been left to mold and turned into sustenance for bookworms.
Sometimes their disappearance is dramatic, like in 1943, when the German army on the way out of town burned so much in useless fury, destroying libraries and archives and historic documents in Naples. Sometime those public documents are personal, like those that had connected my family to that splendid Angevin capital all the way back to 1301.
Sometimes all we have left are the notes of what was in the archival folders, like the notes my great grandfather Nicola wrote about those family records that he found while researching in one of those now burned archives in Naples. In them he found the presence of a Robertus Argentina, seemingly the only one in the city with that last name, employed by the Anjou administration of Naples in 1301 as a military prison officer. And sometimes that is all we have to go on, not the documents themselves, but the notes about them that were left behind.
I am thankful for the work my uncle, Francavilla historian Feliciano Argentina – second born of my dad’s brothers – accomplished sometimes in the early seventies when he catalogued thousands of documents in the Argentina archive and organized them in folders, producing numbered indexes of the documents in each folder. I only found these indexes on a recent trip, not realizing they existed during past visits. What he did, a mindboggling time consuming activity, is an invaluable task as I am now able to go to a specific document from a specific time, regarding a specific person, rather than work blindly through boxes of unsorted documents, and when I find what I am looking for, I am filled with awe at the fact that I am reading and touching the words of my ancestors, centuries later, sometimes penned in their own hand. I never got to say thank you to my uncle, I had scant interest in what he was doing. I wish I could thank him today, along all others who preceded him, and who thought that it mattered to keep this collection of parchment and paper documents in existence.
I care deeply for this collection, not only for myself, but because I hope that it can be of benefit to future researchers of local history. Maintaining such a collection around makes for a heavy burden, especially when the time comes to pass it on to the next generation. I worry that like other such family collections in Salento’s past, all of that has been kept could just as easily be dispersed as individual curios and objects of adornment sold in hundreds of separate transactions by sellers of antiquity to those who seek to add a sense of gravitas to their living rooms, the threads binding those documents becoming unattached from each other, and those relics destined to spend the rest of their existence impressing with their antiquity but orphaned from any meaning.
A plaque in ‘lu palazzu tu li baroni’ manifests the spirit of the house:
“Recall the ancient times, remember one by one the generations; ask your father, and he will narrate their story; ask your elders, and they will tell you”.
POST SCRIPTUM
With this project it is my purpose to give meaning and context to these documents and their human subjects, or at least as much as I am competent enough to understand and deliver. The documents of the first few Francavilla Argentinas are harder to get through. The calligraphy is difficult to read, though I have written in cursive my entire life, and the language is Latin with intrusions of Vulgar, and Spanish during the Aragon years. After the 1600s it gets easier as more documents are printed and the language begins to settle down towards the future Italian.
I am honored that you will dedicate your limited resource of time to reading this, and I will do my best to keep your interest. Please feel free to email me questions on anything that is not clear or you would like further information on.
If you like reading about history, I would like to recommend this beautifully organized site for history readers and writers:
If anyone who you know might enjoy this, please share it with them and help me find more people interested in this project.
Your purpose, as you've stated it, is commendable. I have family from the Benevento area and wouldn't it be amazing if there were something like what you have for them? They were peasants, so likely not, but it is fun to live vicariously through you.
I’m proud of you, your passion for research, and your many accomplishments - such as translating Italian script, even if it is a bit archaic! Can’t wait for photographs of the Argentina historical palazzo with its winding staircases and warren of rooms! Thank you for taking us on this remarkable journey through time and place. Betsy