Mosino Fund | english

MUNICIPAL LIBRARY FRANCO MOSINO FUND

The Mosino Fund is located on the garden level of the "G. Rohlfs" Museum of the Greek-Calabrian Language, in the rooms of the Bova Municipal Library, which are used as a reading room and conference room, fully accessible to the disabled and connected to the Museum by a lift.

The decision to locate the Mosino Fund in the building that also houses the Museum of the Language was dictated by the deep knowledge of the Calabrian Greek language and the relevance of the writings and studies of the professor, who defined himself as a "pro-Greek".

Professor Franco Mosino's most famous work is probably "The Odyssey Written in Reggio: Textual, Topographical, Epigraphic, Philological, Iconographic and Anthropic Evidence', for which he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

The "Franco Mosino" Fund, donated to the Bova Community by the philologist and Greek scholar Franco Mosino, born in 1932 and deceased in 2015, and nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, consists of around 4500 volumes relating to linguistics, philology, history, classical literature and the study of Calabrian history. The collection also includes antiquarian books, texts signed by Gerhard Rohlfs himself, rare editions and Franco Mosino himself, a profound connoisseur of the language of the Greeks of Calabria, of ancient Greek and of the linguistic minorities of southern Italy. Bova has always been dear to Prof. Mosino's heart because it is the chora (the most important town of the Greeks of Calabria) where language, traditions, music and history have remained intact over the millennia. For him and many of his academic friends, such as Prof. Domenico Minuto and the German glottologist Gerhard Rohlfs, it was a source of inspiration and study. For Prof. Mosino, Bova was a place of affection, a real setting that, in his last years as a visually impaired person, he could remember and imagine, and in which he could place his thoughts and desires. In this sense, Prof. Mosino thought that the town of Bova was the ideal place to house the books he had collected throughout his life, his numerous essays, his innumerable scientific articles of a historical and philological nature... in short, everything that was his life for him, and to try to continue to "exist" through what he had collected.

THE HISTORY

The Municipality of Bova, flattered to be able to accept this wish and to have been chosen to fulfil it, tried to do the best it could within the limits of what a local authority could do, well aware that this decision would have involved a commitment of people and resources. But he put difficulties before what could have been the fulfilment of the wish of a man who had dedicated his whole life to the betterment of the Greeks of Calabria and who therefore deserved to be respected by the Bova administration. Therefore, even though there are no documents to prove a "legal" donation to the Bova administration (which, by the way, never thought it necessary to evaluate it), the Fund was valorised with all the effort and commitment of the various administrations that succeeded one another, because they simply thought it was right. It has also been valorised by the Aspromonte National Park Authority, which bought some suitable libraries for the municipality to preserve.

The Municipality of Bova therefore accepted the dozens of boxes and wooden shelves that a lorry (paid for by the Aspromonte Park Authority) unloaded in 2006 on the grounds of the primary school complex, which belongs to the Municipality. The move was carried out by Dr. Carmelo Nucera, president of the Apodiafazzi Cultural Circle in Bova, of which Prof. Mosino was an honorary member, and who was involved by the professor's desire to organise the great "move" of his books, and thus a part of his life, in the best possible way. What is more, the Apodiafazzi Circle in Bova did not have any premises to house the immense patrimony of the Mosino Fund, but the Municipality of Bova did, and rightly so, by involving the Apodiafazzi Circle, in accordance with Mosino's express wishes, since the professor's wish was simply to give the books to the town of Bova, to which he was deeply attached and of which he had been granted "honorary citizenship" during his lifetime by Council Resolution no. 15 of 16 December 2004. For a few years, the collection was kept in the primary school of Bova, then it was transferred to Palazzo Mesiani and partly to the Visitor Centre of the Aspromonte National Park, while waiting for its final location, which came about after the restructuring of the G. Rohlfs Museum of Calabrian Greek. In 2018, following an agreement between the Park Authority and the Municipality of Bova, the Park Authority purchased suitable bookcases so that the books would not be ruined (glassed-in and lockable bookcases, suitable for the preservation of precious volumes) and included it as a location for cultural events. The Municipality, for its part, undertook to promote the Fund as part of the Museum's itineraries, to catalogue it and to make it accessible during guided tours, at the request of researchers and during cultural events related to the identity of the Greeks of Calabria.

THE SINGERS OF URANUS

The environment in which the Mosino Fund is located is on the ground floor of the G. Rohlfs Museum and was created in 2018 thanks to the project "SYNCHRETISMS OF GREEK CALABRIA: SIGNS-TRACES-PAROLE", funded by the Region of Calabria.

The installation was curated by the artist Roberto Lucifero, who, inspired by the concepts of identity and memory, created the contemporary art installation "I Cantori di Urano".

The most important texts have been placed in special bookcases acquired by the Aspromonte National Park Authority for the Bova community, leaving the entire collection and its use to new projects.

Explaining the work, the artist writes. "The land is undeniably the protagonist of rural life, it dictates its rhythms, it imposes strict rules on us if we want to make the most of it. It is a total domination that we cannot ignore if we want to survive. In complex societies, this relationship with nature is greatly weakened and the need to adapt to its rhythms is overtaken by agricultural industrialisation.

In Bova, the domination of nature over man is physically present, both because of the geological characteristics of the place and the agricultural vocation of the territory, accentuated by the presence of Mount Etna, immense on the horizon. The ancient gods, the ones who regulate the moods of nature, are here and float in the space, looking at those who visit it. They are the mythical ancestors that the Greek origin still knows how to tell, establishing a fruitful dialogue with this land, capable of bringing back to the present what has been lost elsewhere.

The "Singers of Uranus" are made from the most common materials of rural life: reeds, wire mesh, everyday objects found in the old houses of Bova, now considered relics of the past, arranged in the form of faces. It is precisely the recognition of the face, one of the most archetypal mechanisms of the human brain, that inspired me to create this installation, in which everyday domestic objects, belonging to the Bova families and of Greek inspiration, take on the characteristics of mythical ancestors, no longer symbols of a threatening nature, but benevolent singers, capable of pronouncing ancient and eloquent silent endecasyllables".

CONCLUSIONS

The Municipality of Bova recognises the Mosino Fund as the property it holds at the express wish of the late professor. Since he has never seen a legal document, he believes that the legitimate heirs are his grandchildren (Irene and Enzo Mosino with Manuela and Giandiego Carastro), who have also recently (July 2022) expressed their recognition by e-mail to the Municipality of Bova and the Park Authority. So, like a "good father of the family", he guards this fund, without ever being told how to do it, and without any explicit constraint from anyone. He simply uses 'common sense', the human resources he is able to involve and the occasions of events and/or small improvements that make it known and publicise its existence.

FUTURE PROSPECTS

The Municipality of Bova intends to give even greater dignity and, above all, usefulness to the Mosino Fund, making it part of the Bova Municipal Library, founded in the 1980s of the last century by the Municipal Council Resolution no. 58 of 12.12.1985. 1985, in order to offer a library service to the residents and returning emigrants who populate the Calabrian municipality every year during the summer months, a library whose municipal fund needs to be reassembled, because until now it has been stored in different places and recatalogued, actions that require resources that the Authority is committed to finding. Precisely in order to pursue this path, the Municipality of Bova, with the Council Resolution no. 50 of 4.06.2020, decided to adhere to the Regional Library System-SBR by sending all the necessary documentation to the Vibonese Library System, an entity that should have been in charge of responding, but for the investigations of the Public Prosecutor's Office related to the management, which fell in the same period, never expressed itself. Moreover, in the same year, in an attempt to digitise the two funds, the Municipality of Bova took part in a "Public notice of the Metropolitan City of RC addressed to the municipalities of the metropolitan area for the granting of economic contributions aimed at supporting initiatives to enrich the library heritage and strengthen the infrastructural equipment of libraries for the year 2020", which unfortunately did not finance digitisation, but only the creation of 10 book trails that could be consulted in the multimedia section.

It is the intention of the Municipality of Bova to join the SBR regional library system, now under the responsibility of the Calabria Regional Department of Culture, for both the Municipal Fund and the Mosino Fund, and in time to participate in calls or expressions of interest that will make it possible to achieve the objective of creating a single municipal library that will preserve and make use of both funds.