I libri nella torre. La biblioteca di Castel Thun, una collezione nobiliare tra XV e XX secolo (con il catalogo del fondo antico) by Giancarlo Petrella (review)

The castle of Thun, situated on a wooded hillside just outside the village of Vigo di Ton, in the Val di Non to the north of Trento, has been inhabited since the thirteenth century by a succession of Counts de Tono. On the death of the last count, Zdenko Franz Thun Hohenstein (Bohemian by birth), in 1982 it finally passed into the administration of the Provincia autonoma di Trento. Closed for a long period of restoration, it officially reopened to the public in April 2010. It includes about 150 rooms containing various valuable collections of art and furniture, but the books, assembled over the centuries by different owners, were transferred to the Archivio provinciale of Trento. What remains of the original library amounts to some eight thousand volumes, many of which had suffered grievously from damp or the attentions of mice and insects.

Giancarlo Petrella, born in 1974 and well known for at least seven volumes of scrupulous bibliographical scholarship, not to mention a large number of articles, is a man of incredible energy. Early in 2011 he was invited to begin researching in Trento the complicated history of the collections of Castle Thun, bearing always in mind the known provenance of individual volumes, and making good use of what-ever manuscript catalogues had survived. The result is the volume under review, comprising an introduction (pp. xix–xxxix), chapter I, Un castello, una biblioteca e un catalogo (pp. 1–124), chapter II, Anatomia di una biblioteca. Libri e lettori in Casa Thun (pp. 125–255), chapter III, Provenienze esterne e acquisti (pp. 257–324), chapter IV, La biblioteca dispersa (pp. 325–383), and chapter V, Catalogo del fondo antico, incunaboli e cinquecentine della Biblioteca di Castel Thun (pp. 385–420). Finally there are indexes of years of printing from 1491 to 1599, of donors and provenances, of places of printing, and of names.

In the first chapter Petrella transcribes two early inventories, one of the armarium (bookcase) of Vittore Thun, dated 1488, containing nineteen titles in German, and the other of Michele Thun (died 1522), consisting of sixty-nine titles in Italian. None of the first list can be identified, owing to the extremely meagre description given in the original; and even of the later list, Petrella can only guess at the possible identity of each edition. In any case, most of these books are no longer in evidence.

Many of the titles are common Aldines or other Venetian imprints, and there is no example of an exciting surprise in the way of a really rare imprint or printer’s name. The short index of places of printing (p. 417) shows that apart from the ubiquitous Venice, the largest numbers of editions came from outside Italy, i.e. eleven from Lyons, ten from Basel, seven from Frankfurt am Main, four from Paris, three each from Nuremberg and Strassburg. Nothing from Naples, Pavia, Verona, Ferrara or Perugia. Three books from Florence, two from Rome, one each from Bologna, Brescia and Padua. Collectors were evidently not interested in the local printing centres of Trento and Collio di Val Trompia.

One temporary exception to this general rule can only be explained in detail, since there have been so many comings and goings at the Castle of Thun. One of the four copies of the Statutes of Trento printed anonymously by Maffeo Fracassini in Trento in 1504, now in the Biblioteca Comunale there, had been presented in 1782 by Domenico Malfatti (1736–1797) to the avid collector Gaudentio Antonio de Gaudentiis (1754–1823), created a baron in 1783. The Thun intercepted his collection of rare books after the Gaudenti -Roccabruna family became extinct, and a judge named Antonio Mazzetti later assembled a...