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 p. i  Cannaiola
Historical Memoirs
collected in the years 1873‑74
by Pietro Bonilli
parish priest of that place

 pag. ii  To The Blessed Archangel Michael,
Prince of the Angelic Host,
Victor over the proud Lucifer,
Defender of the Catholic Church
and Titular of the Parish of Cannaiola,
parish priest Pietro Bonilli
humbly dedicates and consecrates
this lowly work on the town you protect

O Blessed Archangel,
hear the prayers of this poor parish priest
beseeching and imploring for himself and his children,
that you might drive away from them every assault of the enemy,
that you might have them live pious, chaste, and humble,
gathering their spirits at the end of their days
and leading them to a blessed life
at the feet of the Eternal One.

 p. iii  Table
of the Contents covered in this Book

Technical Details

Source of the Text and Copyright

Don Pietro Bonilli's memoir has never been published. The text I've put onsite is my transcription of a photocopy of a typescript by an unknown hand of what I believe to be an original handwritten manuscript by Fr. Bonilli. It came to me courtesy of my friend Franco Spellani of Pro Trevi, and appears to have been provided to him by the good Sisters of the Sanctuary of the Blessed Pietro Bonilli in Cannaiola.

Details will very likely follow soon, since they impact the copyright status of the work and of my transcription. For the present, until the copyright status of the work is made fully clear, I am withholding any permission to redistribute this transcription in print or by other electronic means.

Illustrations

Someone — presumably Fr. Bonilli followed by the typist who transcribed the work — provided several plans of various construction phases of the parish church of Cannaiola over the years. I've redrawn them as faithfully as possible while making them pleasing to the eye. There are no other illustrations.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination of the typescript is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode. If and when I get access to the original manuscript or even a different transcription, I may make other adjustments.

In addition to the local anchors called for by the text itself, I've inserted a number of others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.) In this case, besides, scanning would have been pretty much impossible.

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I like to think that my text is completely errorfree (but keep on reading); but at any rate a red background would mean that the page had not been proofread. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

For the time being though, in view of my imperfect knowledge of 19c Italian, ecclesiastical terminology, etc., quite a few spots are shown like this: I'm awaiting expert advice from various sources, chief among them my friend Franco.

The typescript was not proofread, and is replete with many errors; not only that, but it is clear that the underlying original text must be considered a draft that the author failed to complete: the clearest indication is in fact given right in the title, . . . Historical Memoirs collected in the years 1873‑74 . . . — yet pp154‑163 deal with the events of 1875‑1877. A number of details also, at least in the typed transcript, are left blank: measurements of paintings and statues, dates, financial details, etc.

Some of the errors in the typescript are of the most obvious kind, clearly due to the transcriber: I corrected them, marking them with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the underscored words to read what was actually printed. Finally, some spellings and turns of phrase that seemed odd to me are marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that I did check them.

Now in the case of similarly disordered original texts onsite, I usually make these corrections tacitly, where only an inspection of the sourcecode will show the multiplicity of errors: it is pointless, invidious, and pedantic to point them all out in dreary detail, all the more so that we are dealing with a draft that would almost certainly not have been published as it now stands by its author. Here, however, I've forced myself to make these "corrections" all visible right off, since my knowledge of 19c Italian is not secure enough: some of them may well be perfectly OK, and it's fairer to let you the reader judge for yourself. Feedback is heartily welcome; and I should be very happy to reduce these error notices to the barest minimum.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: and if you have the original manuscript or a good copy of it, or even a better copy of the typed transcription, I would really appreciate hearing from you.

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The typescript is unillustrated, except for the plans of the parish church. The icon I use to indicate this section of my site is Fr. Bonilli's parish church, a miniature sepia-toned version of a photograph I took of it in 2004.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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