THE TABLETS OF AMALFI

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 186, 4 May 1929, Page 29

THE TABLETS OF AMALFI

LONG-LOST TREASURE RETURNS TO ITALY

Negotiations between the Italian and Austrian Governments have had a happy ending in an exchange of treasures, and Italy is now again in possession of the famous “Tavole Amalfitane,” or the medieval maritime code which was enforced in all the ports of the East while Amalfi flourished as a seu power, and recognised in the Mediterranean up to 1603. The precious document consists of sixty-six articles, of which twenty-one are in Latin, belonging probably to the end of A.D. 1100, while the remaining forty-five articles, in Italian, are two centuries later. The tablets came in to possession of the Foscarini family, who boasted several bibliographs and writers during the seventeenth century. When this patrician Venetian family became impoverished the volume of Amalfi documents was sold, with many other relics, to the Habsburgs, in order to pay the taxes. Some day we may perhaps learn the story of how the tablets left the archives of Amalfi and migrated to Venice, just as their presence was discovered iu 1844, in the Palatine Library of Vienna among the papers of Marco Foscarini, Doge and Historian.