Cultural history class this week includes the bicycle boom of the 1890s.
Newspapers from this period are filled with the complaints of men who say bicycles ruined their marriages, since wives only care to ride and no longer tend to their "duties."
The Rev. Thomas Gregory saw the bike as a threat to his parishioners' intellect and health.
"It annihilates the reading habit. The libraries are deserted. It is a menace to domestic virtues. It breaks up and destroys the home."
The L’Archivio di Stato di Venezia : indice generale, storico, descrittivo ed analitico (shortened ASV Indice) by Andrea da Mosto is a very useful reference to all the major and minor institutions and offices of the Republic of Venice.
The Dizionario del Dialetto Veneziano by Giuseppe Boerio
The Dizionario del Dialetto Veneziano by Giuseppe Boerio from 1829 is the essential dictionary of the late Venetian language for anybody trying to read old Venetian texts.
The Lessico Veneto — Lexicon of the Veneto — by Fabio Mutinelli from 1851 is another of those must-have books for anybody interested in Venetian history, which is exact why it was written.
Gaetano Salvemini smuggled a copy of the court transcripts of Matteotti's trial out of Italy:
"Per conto mio, già nell'agosto del 1925, avevo trafugato fuori d'Italia una copia della requisitoria del Pubblico Ministero Santoro nella inchiesta senatoriale sulle accuse mosse da Giuseppe Do- nati contro il direttore generale della pubblica sicurezza, generale De Bono. Dopo averli utilizzati affidai quei docu- menti alla biblioteca della School of Economics di Londra, nel dicembre 1926"
The day after there was an unsuccessful attempt to steal the transcripts, but they were kept in the Library's safe.
Very excited that we are now going to be digitising these transcripts and putting them freely available online, 100 years after Matteotti's murder. Hopefully they will be available by end of June this year. Attached is a photograph of them in situ.