Old Neapolitan Newspapers and Journals
I have a dream. Like
most people who enjoy browsing in old magazines and
newspapers, I am a big fan of the on-going Digitizing of
Everything. I love the idea that I can hit a key and
read copies of the North American Review from 1820 on my
computer screen. It should all be up there —every last
word of all the copies of every major newspaper in the
world. (I am willing to pay a reasonable subscription
fee.)
How close is that to
happening? Not very, at least from my recent experience
in trying to read, easily, articles from the Giornale
del Regno delle Due Sicilie ( GRDS),
the Journal of the Kingdom of
the Two Sicilies, the official organ of the
government of the kingdom of Naples in its last 40 years
of existence before being incorporated into the modern
nation state of united Italy. All the copies exist and
they are neatly bound, year by year, on the shelves of
various libraries in my neck of the woods, most
prominently in the National Library of Naples on the
premises of the Royal Palace. The paper is large format,
good rag quality, paper still white, and still
relatively easy to read.
I had a few lines
rehearsed:
“Where is the
digitized version of the GRDS? Can you put in
the search term (X) so I can see all the references to
it between 1820 and 1860…uh…please? ” At that point,
my dream shades over imperceptibly to the nightmare
scene from Stanley Kubrick’s great 1968
science-fiction film, 2001, Space Odyssey,
where intrepid spaceman David Bowman has been locked
out of the ship and is pleading with super computer,
HAL 9000, to be let back in. (HAL is perfect in all
things except that he is bent on offing the entire
crew.)
“Open the hatch, HAL.”
“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m
afraid I can’t do that.”
(The photo, above, shows Bowman using
HAL
to digitize old Neapolitan journals. The film was
science fiction.)
More or less, that would be the librarian’s response, but it would be good for a few laughs and they might even let me look at some bound copies. Or I might try, “Say, you don’t know if there is any outlandishly ambitious plan to actually digitize these pages? I’ll gladly volunteer a few hours week to hunt and peck my way into the Digitizers Hall of Fame.” (It’ll have to be hunt and peck, I think, because OCR —optical character recognition— on those old pages with their irregular fonts and imperfect type impressions is hopeless.) That would be so nauseatingly ingratiating that it might actually work.
Here are a few
books about
the journals of the
Naples of
yesteryear:
—Addeo, Girolamo.
(1988) La stampa periodica napoletana del decennio
francese. Napoli.
—Battaglini, Mario. (1988) Napoli1799:
giornali giacobini. Rome: Borzi ed.
—Toma, Peiro Antonio. (1999) Giornali e
Giornalisti a Napoli 1799-1999.
Napoli: Grimaldi & C.
—Zazo, Alfredo. (1985) Il Giornalismo a Napoli
nella prima meta’ del secolo XIX, 2nd
ed. Napoli: Generoso Procaccini ed.
And here
are the ones I want to be able to read. Yesterday!
1799—Republican papers (during the brief six months of the Neapolitan Republic):
—Monitore Napolitano [spelling, sic], founded by Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel
—Corriere di Napoli e
Sicilia
—Giornale
Patriotica della Reppublica
—Il Vero
Repubblicano
—Il Veditore Repubblicano
1808—Under the French:
—Monitore Napolitano
(Pimentel’s journal,
version 2)
—Corriere
di Napoli
These were both suppressed by Murat and
consolidated in 1811 as
—Monitore delle due Sicilie (MDS), published between March1806 and Oct 1815.
They were
supplemented by
—Giornale del Vesuvio
—La
Gazetta Napolitana
as well as by the first
paper especially for women: Corriere delle dame and the first
paper that ran nothing but advertising, Il Giornale degli Annunzi.
With the return of the
Bourbons after the Congress of Vienna, the MDS changed
to the Giornale delle Due Sicilie and
then to the Giornale del Regno delle Due Sicilie. In the 1820s, with the
constitutional reform, that title changed to Giornale Costituzionale del Regno delle Due
Sicilie. During 1820s. amidst the fervor for
constitutional government, there appeared, as well:
—La Minerva
napolitana— (an advocate of a united Italy)
—La voce del secolo
—La amica della costituzione
In the 1830s:
Il Progresso delle lettere, delle scienze e
delle arti (Progress
of letters, sciences and arts) one of among 30 such
smaller papers dedicated to the arts and sciences.
The first illustrated
feature magazine, Il Nazionale, a
supporter of the new constitution and an advocate of a
united Italy, appeared briefly in 1848.
see also: Women's Journals of the 19th
Century
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