 main index © Jeff Matthews 2002-2012 main index
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:
“Open the hatch, HAL.” “I’m
sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” (The
photo, above, shows
Bowman using HAL 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: 1799—Republican papers (during the brief six months of the Neapolitan Republic): —Monitore Napolitano
[spelling, sic], founded by Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel 1808—Under the French: —Monitore
Napolitano
(Pimentel’s journal,
version 2) —Monitore delle due Sicilie (MDS), published between March1806 and Oct 1815. —Giornale del
Vesuvio 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:
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 |
“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.)