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Examination and discussion of the specific nature of the Cultural property, in relation to their misterious origin and their current mental function, both in connection with the development of a specific stage of civilization and the needs of the modern man.

Nella prima parte, l’articolo analizza il rapporto e le differenze tra ‘cultura’ e ‘informazione’ da un punto di vista neurologico e cognitivo. Nella seconda parte si riflette sul ruolo delle biblioteche quali archivi della creazione intellettuale e spirituale degli uomini, nonché ponte fra la cultura del passato e quella del presente: cultura che, per secoli, è stata rappresentata dal patrimonio documentario delle biblioteche stesse. Oggi, tuttavia, dilatata dal concetto di ‘scienza’, la cultura ha smarrito i suoi connotati tradizionali, al punto che sono entrate in crisi di identità sia la sua configurazione che il suo futuro.

The paper proposes, also as support of the National Library Service, the creation of a national repertoire that chronologically indexes the editorial production of the Italian authors, both handwritten and printed. The repertoire, entitled Bibliographic Dictionary of Italian Authors, would offer systematic evidence of the works of each Italian author, with a hypothetical regional structure.

Contrary to the current historiography on the modern European Academies, there is a manuscript N.500 in the Gambalunghian Library in Rimini, that contains the proceedings of an Academy founded in that city in the XIV century, that becomes the first European Academy in the modern times.

Libraries always have been evidence of civilization, culture, tradition, and progress. However, from the Enlightenment period and especially after the French Revolution, libraries become a factor of not only individual, but also collective and social education and elevation. In 1837, Louis Aimé Martin – conservator of the library of Saint Geneviève in Paris – published the essay Plan d’une bibliotheque universelle, where the library is described as a national educational enterprise whose aim is to bring together within the sameprinciples all classes of society. The essay cites the works of the most notable authors of all disciplines, divided by nations for the literary sphere.

The genetic code of the human species requires us to react aggressively to threatening situations. Culture, history – as magistra vitae –, philosophy, law and even religion have failed to quell aggressive instincts except through threats and punishments. Until today, scientific achievements have not changed the biological determinants of our species, so as to eliminate its aggressive and destructive components. The recent electronic communication system, which allows not only the exchange of information but also the immediate transmission of emotional and empathic states, can have unpredictable and incisive effects on the collective transformation of human beings.

The rules of book-cataloging are incomplete and inaccurate when they are based on a particular book-collection and on a particular historical context. The proper way to find universal and satisfactory cataloging rules is to deduce them by the principles of bibliography. Since the bibliography has the task to identify and organize the semantic structures and links which underlying the human knowledge, a cataloging system based on bibliography would have the same features. Such a system would be effective in every age and context.

The death of Pietro Canneti, abbot of the Classense Monastery of Ravenna and General of the Camaldolese’s Order, was the cause of an unusual event. Actually, the funeral oration of Canneti was pronounced by Giovanni Bianchi, a doctor, instead of a religious dignitary as usual. The motivations behind this choice are an enigma to solve still today.

In the second half of the nineteenth century Georg Simmel had predicted that the development of technology would become so important as to change not only the living conditions of humanity but to overwhelm its own level of culture and intellectuality of the population. Subjectivity would have been incorporated into objects while the human one would have decayed and become barred. In a certain sense it is, even if on another plane, what the advances of artificial intelligence foresee. Apart from the sociological findings, the defense of subjectivity and of human culture has been focused and fully justified with the arguments put forward by Martin Heidegger.

A correct assessment of the History have to be based on an objective evaluation of each period on its own. Every historical period can be properly understood only if it is not linked to an abstract idea of continuous human progress and improvement. At the same time, a critical analysis of various cultural periods have to consider how these ones were lived and perceived by the societies living that period. A last level of interpretation have to be reserved to the mentality and feelings of the protagonists of the various cultural periods, because they could have a mislead perception of their own era, such as Giacomo Leopardi.

In 1957 Martin Heidegger highlighted how the computer language could be a poor imitation of the human language. The computer, infact, can reproduce only the logical and mathematical skills of the human mind, not the feelings and the ethics. Neither Julien Offray de La Mettrie, who in 1758 theorized the figure of the so called Machine man, had advanced the hypothesis that a machine could reproduce the psychic and intellectual abilities of a human being. This hypothesis is affected by some of the unique characteristics of the human species, among which the sensitivity for music.

Johann Georg Meusel’s Leitfaden aus Geschichte der Gelehrsamkeit (Leipzig 1799-1800) is one of the most important historical works about European culture at the end of the 18th century. The six sections at the end of the work are of great interest for the history of the eighteenth century and the Illuminism. Meusel realizes in this part of the work a remarkable picture of this period, extremely accurate and astonishingly modern.

During the ancient period, Libraries, Archives and Museums had the same name, because they were the home of the Muses, but over the centuries, the three institutions have diversified. The museums display individual specimens; libraries and archives predominantly preserve and offer library objects and documents. While the manuscripts are kept, generally, in individual pieces, the books, after the invention of printing, exist in multiple copies, but there is no general bibliographic map to find specificity, duplication, or deficiencies. The digitization of works and editions of the past aggravates the problems of organization and bibliographic mapping, because it provides the sources of consultation and indexing, but ignores the imposing mass of written materials that represented the documentary basin of different ages, and who they are scattered in towns and historic European libraries.

Conrad Gesner, the naturalist, theologian and bibliographer, for the first time has processed the substantial difference between the energy and information, and has presented the educational and social benefits of communication and dissemination typographical. Matter and energy are consumed due to entropic processes, while information can be replicated without limits with a least cost. Contemporary electronic and digital media configurations are changing the structures and modes of communication and determine the change in morphology and organization of libraries, also altering the functions and social impact, to the extent that it is reasonable to assume the dissolution of the establishment librarian as it has been handed down.

The author, who is one of the most eminent Italian scholars of Library History and Bibliography, deals with the fate of libraries in the technological age. Until the half of the past century, it would not be possible to think about libraries disappearance, because they were considered fortresses of civil advancement and because even the idea of their destruction would be considered a barbarity. Nowadays, we are facing a profound crisis that led to radical transformations. In the current scenario, libraries are condemned to be "irrelevant" and the only way to control their decline is to transform them into museums, making collections available and preserving library buildings. These opinions are also true with respect to less prestigious libraries, whose collections often testify the history of a territory or a community. A honest reflection on the future of libraries could not take into account "the cultural realities in the different layers of society, of their tendencies, of their needs, and of the technological ways already existing for their satisfaction".

Descartes outlined human intelligence as a divine gift, albeit in a system governed by universal laws of physics and mathematics. In the eighteenth century the camaldolite Guido Grandi and Tommaso Ceva, both mathematicians, had a dispute about the interpretation of the Cartesian model of human intelligence. This case provides an opportunity to retrace the path of a speculative techno-philosophical question concerning the human possibility to equipping robots with the ability to experience a self-consciousness.

The aim of the Scholarship Erudition is the fact-finding, and it is to be made by the analysis of documentation. The choice of the facts to be analyzed, however, is subjective and could lead to wrong conclusions. A good example is given by the codex Cam. B. Armadio 2.I of the Classense Library in Ravenna. Inside the codex there is a note by Santi Muratori, the librarian of Classense. The note says the book is to throw away. An analysis of the codex reveals that it is a collection of dissertations and commentaries with quotations from the Fathers of the Church, from Plato and Plotinus, and sometimes the poems of Dante. Probably, the book was for aloud reading during meals of the Camaldolese monks and it reveals a remarkable intellectual liveliness of the monastic community. The codex reveals itself as a good tool for a better knowledge of the Camaldolese’s community, despite of the negative rating by Santi Muratori.

The editions of incunabula currently held by Italian libraries appear to be roughly 11,000 for a total of 100,000 copies so far identified. Without adequate statistical calculation tools, but according to the data from the Indice Generale degli Incunaboli (IGI), The Author speculates the number of lost editions and books through the centuries.