Pietro Bongiorno: Amanuensis
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Technical sheet prepared by: Region of Sicily - Department of cultural heritage and Sicilian identity - CRicd: Regional center for inventory, cataloging and documentation and Sicilian regional film library
Despite the scarce news relating to pre-Norman Sicily, it is known, however, that monasteries were historically the places dedicated to the transmission of knowledge, in fact they took care of the writing art on parchments and waxed tablets. One of the tasks was precisely the care of scriptorium and of the library: the librarian dictated, lo scriptor wrote, the proofreader checked for errors and the miniator he decorated the codices and illustrated them with miniatures. Thanks to this patient and long work, the Holy Scriptures, Greek and Latin works, some important historical texts as well as poetic and naturalistic texts have been handed down, a part of the enormous treasure of knowledge produced by Greco-Roman antiquity. The scriptorium was a spacious and bright room, which not all monasteries had, where the countless hours of the amanuensis monks worked. The Muslim presence in Sicily and the subsequent Norman conquest unfortunately led to the loss of written records prior to the XNUMXth century. In the Norman period, even the court offices and the curias gradually turned into writing centers. writing thus also became an instrument for the transmission of law and administrative practice. Over time, particularly from the sixteenth century, writing freed itself of the formal parameters encoded to arrive at freer expressive forms.
Pietro Bongiorno, known as Petrus, was born in Gangi in 1950, and belongs to the generation that spends the first years of school on wooden stalls with an inclined surface with a groove for the nib and a hole for the inkwell; evidently the gesture of dipping the nib associating it with beautiful writing must have remained indelible in his memory, so much so that the first commitment of ars scriptoria (add in beautiful hand the names of some benefactors in the register of the Association of S. Vincenzo di Gangi) awakens the memories and originates his wonderful experience as a calligrapher and amanuensis. This passion involves study and time, dedication and deepening. He experiments with various types of nibs until he finds the ones that suit him best, such as the calligrapher's with a truncated steel tip. Even the inks are a world to be experienced with their consistency and fluidity: today he uses inks created personally with long-proven elements such as ox gall and gum arabic. At the time, people wrote on papyrus and parchment and "Petrus" looks for papyrus and creates goat or lambskin parchments, carrying out each phase of production using water and lime, subsequent stripping, framing, drying and smoothing with pumice stone. In his vast experience, the use of all kinds of writing objects is not lacking: quills, wax tablets, sepia inks and one could continue in a list of objects from antiquity. scriptorium full of fascination and knowledge to pass on.
Card insertion: Ignazio Caloggero
Photo: https://reis.cricd.it/
Information contributions: Ignazio Caloggero / Web
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