Two years ago I published transcriptions of two interesting copies of Del Frate's 1876 treatise Istruzione per la scherma di sciabola e di spada containing notes written the owners of the books when they studied at the Milan Fencing Master's School. I stated at the end of the article that it is highly likely that additional copies of this kind still survive, and after sending out some enquiries I did indeed located one more. This copy originally belonged to Antonio Maragliano, and it now resides with the Biblioteca Polo Umanistico-Bioscienze at the University of Teramo. Below you may find a standalone transcription of the manuscript as well as a side-by-side comparison with the two previously-discussed manuscripts by Lombardi and Barbasetti.
Maragliano manuscript transcription
Maragliano's notes are incomplete and the shortest of the three, coming in at around a third the length of Lombardi's notes, and all the content contained in his notes can also be found in both Lombardi and Barbasetti's. As indicated on the first manuscript page, Maragliano was a student of the 1883-84 course at the Master's School, which was the last course intake at the school before its closure in March 1884.1 Given that this course would have only been around four months in when the school closed, the incomplete nature of Maragliano's manuscript reflect this interruption, indicating the point in the theory curriculum the students had reached in March 1884. Maragliano and his fellow students were able to resume their training the following year in a condensed course at the new Master's School in Rome under Masaniello Parise.2 While Maragliano's name can be found in this subsequent intake, it is unclear if he did end up graduating.
Despite their brevity, Maragliano's notes provide a valuable third point of comparison in determining which of the minor variations across the three manuscripts are more likely to be representative of the reference material they were transcribing. In general it is Barbasetti who appears to deviate more often from the original wording through paraphrasing and the occasional omission. Given how minor these variations are, Maragliano's notes provide significant proof that, at least with regard to the content all three manuscripts have in common, the reference material remained very consistent between the years 1876 and 1884.
My sincere thanks to the library staff at the University of Teramo for providing the scans of this manuscript.
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1 "Da Milano a Roma," Corriere della Sera, 11 March 1884, 3.↩2 Cesare Ricotti-Magnani, "N. 90. - Corso speciale presso la scuola magistrale di scherma," Giornale Militare 1885: parte seconda, no. 31 (30 July 1885): 340–1.↩
