archivio

In his will, written a few months before his death, Raffaello Caverni had named as his universal heirs his five brothers and their descendants, leaving to them all his possessions, including his archive.

The family decided that the keeper of the manuscripts should be Egisto Caverni, the son of Giuseppe (who was Raffaello’s brother), and rejected the proposal of Desiderio Chilovi, the then director of the Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, who was keen to acquire, or at least to have on deposit, the entire collection.

In the years following Caverni’s death, Filippo Orlando, who had become a friend because of their long involvement in the journal “Letture di famiglia“, of which he was the editor, did his utmost to find a public library that could acquire the papers, even trying to involve Antonio Favaro, despite his very bad relationship with Caverni, his old friend from the days of Galileo studies, a relationship that had kept them apart for many years before Caverni’s death.

In spite of repeated attempts, Orlando had no success, and the papers remained at San Quirico di Montelupo in the home of Egisto, Caverni’s nephew, effectively making the publication of the unpublished part of Storia del metodo sperimentale in Italia impossible.  More than one scholar would have welcomed the chance to take on this project, but it would have required too much work onsite.

In the following years the archive was moved twice to two different homes in Montelupo, escaping first the indirect ravages of the First World War and then the direct disasters caused by the flooding of the River Pesa, whose waters had lapped against the manuscripts kept on the ground floor.

A second flood destroyed the family business, and Egisto Caverni was forced to move to Prato.  However, his uncle’s archive remained at Montelupo, used as collateral for a loan from some relatives, which had been made available to finance the opening of a new factory.

It was Egisto’s son Lamberto who redeemed the loan many years later.  He was also shrewd enough to take the archive with him during the war, when he found refuge in the basement of the church of San Pietro at Figline di Prato; this saved it from the American bombing that razed to the ground his house and factory on 17th  January 1944.

The manuscripts enjoyed more tranquil years after they passed into the possession of the grandson Piero Caverni, but the damage that they had suffered was serious and, in some cases, irreversible.

In order to save the archive from further losses, the Museo Galileo and Paola Caverni, the daughter of Piero and the current owner, have reached an agreement with the aim of compiling a complete catalogue of it.  The archive had never been organised, even before it suffered so much damage; the papers, frequently without any numbering, had been mainly arranged by size, thus mixing up separate works, which then needed to be reconstructed page by page; inexperienced hands had detached and arranged chronologically some preparatory work and notes,  which ignored a sort of thematic organisation by the author himself, an organisation that indeed existed and could only be partly preserved.  Several mutilations, caused by the criminal removal of pages or the poor state of repair, have made the task of attributing authorship of some pages very arduous and, in some (fortunately rare) cases, impossible.

Now the catalogue of the archive makes up the framework of the digital library of Raffaello Caverni.