Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Istituto di Filologia Classica et di Papirologia
Largo A. Gemelli 1
dott. Carla Balconi
Largo A. Gemelli 1
- O., numbers from 1 till 8
- P. Med., numbers such as 68.04 and 90.69 [with the year of acquisition?]
- P. Med., numbers from 1 till 322
- P. Med. Bar., numbers from 1 till 17
- P. Med. CNR, numbers 68.2 and 68.3
- P. Med. Copto, numbers such as 69.69 and 76.26
- P. Med. Copto, numbers from 246 till 259
|Conservation:||The papyri are all preserved in the Istituto di Filologia Classica e Papirologia, in a room which is also the office of Carla Balconi, presently charged of the course of Papyrology at the university. Almost all the texts are kept under glass in a large chest of drawers, while some fragments are still in folders stored in a cupboard.|
|Inventarisation:||A list of the papyri is available in the office of Prof. C. Balconi. The Library of the Catholic University has a home-page in the University site, which includes a page for the papyri, but at the moment it contains only a very concise description of the collection and has no images.|
The collection has been studied by Calderini, Montevecchi and Daris. Some texts are under study by Giovanni Geraci and his pupils Carla Salvaterra and Lucia Criscuolo in Bologna. Presently the collection, which is enlisted as patrimony of the University Library, is formally entrusted to Carla Balconi, the teacher of Papyrology, and to prof. Mario Cantilena, the director of the Institute.
The two volumes of P.Med. collected all the papyri published until 1966. After that, most of the papyri have been published in Aegyptus (although also a few did appear in miscellanies as Scritti Montevecchi, P.Turner, Papyrol. Lupiensia, P.Coll.Youtie and P.Bingen) and they are therefore regularly included in the Sammelbuch.
|Highlights:||4th century gospel of Marcus (LDAB 2909); animal fable (LDAB 6788); SB XII 11012 (letter of the emperor Nero to a city); invective against Rabirius Postumus (SB XXII 15203)|
The papyrus collection of the Catholic University in Milan contains about 1,000 texts, gathered through two main gifts and many purchases of relatively small groups of papyri between 1922 and 1990, the date of the last acquisition. The gifts were made around 1922-1924 by private sponsors, such as the family Jacovelli-Vita and Castelli, to the Scuola Papirologica di Milano. The purchases were made thanks to the financial support of private benefactors, such as the family Barelli, or of public institutions (Ministry and CNR). Orsolina Montevecchi, who went regularly to Egypt from 1968 to 1976, bought the last groups, all Ptolemaic documents from cartonnage. All the papyri purchased by Montevecchi have a P.Med. inventory number consisting of two figures, the first one being the year of the acquisition; the older papyri have a simple inventory number. For these it is now impossible to know exactly when they entered the collection. The Catholic University still has the intention to buy papyri, but in the last years the financial resources have been seriously reduced.
There are 324 papyri in the so-called 'fondi Jacovelli-Vita e Castelli', 30 of which are Coptic. 636 papyri were bought between 1968 and 1990, 9 of which are Coptic. So the collection contains 960 papyri plus some very small fragments or frustuli , about 50 ostraca (2 or 3 in Coptic) and 4 wooden-tablets (one seems to be a mummy-label). 272 out of 324 of the older P.Med., and 179 out of 636 of the more recent group have been edited, the total being 451, which is about half of the collection. What is left, is mainly a great amount of small fragments, which might be connected with some other documents, but are not in general very appealing.
The vast majority of the published (but not of the unpublished) papyri is Roman, the Ptolemaic and Byzantine periods representing each about one third of the main group. Greek literary and sub-literary papyri are few, less than 35, nearly all them published. There are also 26 Coptic papyri, published by S. Pernigotti (who is also preparing the edition of a last group, which will count no more than 25 texts), 3 or 4 small hieratic texts and 2 or 3 demotic texts.