One click, one archive. It is normal in manuscript documents to find a stylised drawing of a hand with an index finger marking a precise section in the text. In this case, the symbol has a modern look but the same function: to mark a point. By clicking on it you leave the panoramic route through the history of the Archive and catapult yourself directly among the sources, the true cultural heritage of Pomposa Abbey. But before setting off, a quick glance at the map of what has been published could be useful for orientation…

In the common imagination the Middle Ages coincides with a dark moment of history, a period of decadence and material poverty. The expression came into use among men of culture of the Renaissance to mark the differences with the grandeur of the ancient world.
The Middle Ages has no exact chronological terms and is conventionally included between the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476) and the discovery of America (1492).
Contradictions, as in every era, were not lacking. If on the one hand, for example, writing and reading were so uncommon as to be little used even by sovereigns and emperors, the creation of high literary and poetic works, the birth of the first universities, the transcription of works by ancient authors, the creation of illuminated manuscripts and manuscripts of high cultural value date back to this period.
Pomposa Abbey and its monks represent a religious and intellectual nerve center in the Po Delta area. Pomposa reached prestige and economic prosperity in the Middle Ages (it hosted within its walls, among others, Federico Barbarossa and Dante Alighieri).
It was the flooding of the Po at Ficarolo in the middle of the twelfth century that triggered the gradual and inexorable transformation of the Insula Pomposa into an unhealthy swamp and led three centuries later to the transfer of the monks to the convent of San Benedetto in Ferrara, although the function of Pomposa as a provostry lasted until the end of the eighteenth century, which coincides with the Napoleonic suppression of the major ecclesiastical institutions.

The Archives and the Library, which were dispersed after the departure of the brothers from the monastery and its definitive suppression by Innocent X (1653), found new homes at different times: partly in Ferrara Diocesan Historical Archive and in the Archive of the Benedictine Abbey of Montecassino, partly in the State archives of Modena, Milan and Rome. These parts, even though divided, have a unique physiognomy, in terms of cultural value and historical unity. A unique memory that is being recomposed virtually in the Pomposa in progress database, in order to make available sources that, for the most part, have not yet been published and to overcome the geographical distances between territories.
With a corpus of more than 1600 archival units, including parchments, registers and files, the project began with the digitization, description and publication of 500 documents between the 10th century and the 15th century, distributed between Montecassino and Modena: a set of public and private documents, in chronological continuity and sufficiently complete to illuminate the central centuries of the history of Pomposa, with particular reference to the 13th and 14th centuries in which the cultural, artistic, economic and political events of the Abbey reached their peak.
The private archives of the Abbey of Montecassino – the mother house of the Benedictine Order – preserve the main Pomposa collection, the most consistent and above all the most intact in terms of documentary links and chronological coverage.
The State Archives of Modena preserve important public documents of particular palaeographic and diplomatic value and of notable historical value, as they testify to the privileges granted to the Abbey by the emperors, to the patronage of the Este family…
Why not venture out to discover what was written by the patient amanuensis? We start from here.