Cagiati, Numismatists, collectors and collections, of coins and medals, in Italy, by Lombardi

Memmo Cagiati, Numismatists, collectors and collections, of coins and medals, in Italy, edited by Luca Lombardi, Preface by Giuseppe Ruotolo, work published under the aegis of the Mediterranean Society of Numismatic Metrology, Biblionumis Edizioni, Terlizzi 2018, pp. XIV, 118, 17 x 12 cm, editorial paperback, ISBN 978-88-99512-04-0.

Anastatic reprint of the ed. Tip. The Vittoria A. Wirz & Sons, Naples 1925.

The reprint of the volume "Numismatics, Collectors and Collections, of coins and medals, in Italy", published in 1925, once again pays full recognition to Memmo Cagiati for his unconditional commitment to numismatics, one year after the 150th anniversary of his birth. With the work, Cagiati wanted to catalog the public and private collections present in Italy - providing precise and secure information about their placement, their scientific orientation, their singularities and their consistency - and to register the numismatics scholars and the authors of publications, in order to propose useful references to researchers, scholars, the simplest collectors and more generally for a better knowledge of the subject. The result was a volume that today offers a clear and precious snapshot of the varied scenario of numismatic research and collecting in the early decades of the twentieth century, highlighting its diffusion by geographical area and its bursting recovery after the First World War. Thus we discover, for example, that in Bari there were three important private numismatic collections and others there were in Corato and Molfetta, obviously with a particular interest aimed at the coins of Magna Graecia and the medieval and modern ones of Southern Italy. A similar situation can be found in the provinces of Lecce, Brindisi and Taranto, and then in Lucera, Manfredonia, Sansevero and Troia in the province of Foggia. Long is the list of Neapolitan scholars, including the author of the work himself who, after having dedicated a lifetime to the study of the coins that had beaten the Lombards, Normans, Swabians, Angevins and Aragonese in the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, "now collects well-preserved Greek coins ". Leafing through the volume it is noted that in Rome and throughout central Italy the coins of the Roman pontiffs were studied, almost with the same diffusion with which the pontifical medals were collected. In Milan and Turin, the series of coins of the House of Savoy were those to which good attention was paid, without forgetting the issues of the many minor mints; among the medals the Napoleonic medals and those of the Italian Risorgimento aroused greater interest. Everywhere Roman coins were appreciated, mainly from the imperial period, while trials and projects of Savoy coins were analyzed in Milan, medieval and modern commercial cards, tokens and seals were collected in Florence, the particular Punic series were explored in Sicily and Sardinia and the Etruscan types in Tuscany. In Rome of the famous numismatic collection of Vittorio Emanuele III, the scientific basis of the "Corpus Nummorum Italicorum", whose compilation the most expert numismatists in Italy collaborated with, the consistency of 80,000 pieces is reported. Reprinted today by Luca Lombardi with a Preface by Giuseppe Ruotolo, the work has been published in a limited number of copies on ivory paper. As proof of the exceptional nature of this publishing event, the publication is made under the aegis of the Mediterranean Society of Numismatic Metrology.