Due biblioteche cracoviesi del tardo Seicento: piani di lettura incrociati fra presente e passato
Two Cracow Libraries from the Late Seventeenth Century: Cross-Reading Planes between Present and Past

Summary/Abstract: The essay examines two late seventeenth-century libraries owned by Craco- vian citizens of Italian origin. The first one is the library of Andrzej Kortyn (d. 1672), i.e. Andrea Cortini, an Italian of the second generation born to a family originally from Val Bregaglia, in Grisons; the second is the library of Girolamo Pinocci (d. 1676), a Lucchese merchant and royal secretary, who arrived in Poland at a young age and acquired a firm social standing. For Cortini, the inventory includes 76 titles lacking place and year of edi- tion, but at times with an indication of format. For Pinocci there is instead a detailed bibliographic inventory that Karolina Targosz edited in 1967, an abundant list of 1,874 titles including the publisher and the place and year of publication. The formation of both libraries dates back to the previous century, and the cross-data of each tells us a great deal about seventeenth- -century Cracow, a city that, while no longer the capital of the Kingdom, undoubtedly remained at the centre of Rzeczpospolita life. But they also describe the lively “Italian” Cracow of the past, a Cracow that had been an important hub of sixteenth-century commerce, full of merchants from Florence and Lucca; a qualified cultural centre where Erasmus had his admi- rers, and home to an internationally admired university; a place of religious freedom where the coexistence of faiths manifested itself in all its amplitude, and long constituted a safe haven for Italian heretics fleeing the peninsula.

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