Da archivio familiare a collezione gentilizia. Il fondo Montereale Mantica

From family archive to aristocratic collection. The Montereale Mantica collection The history of the Montereale Mantica family starts at the beginning of the Seventeenth century from the union of two dynasties with different background and origin, but both significantly present in the XV-XVII centuries in the social and political life of Pordenone. An important role built also thanks to the network of parental ties woven over time with members of the Friulian aristocracy, including the Fontana and Ricchieri. It is no coincidence, therefore, that two fundamental works to the city's history - the Diplomatarium Portusnaonense by Giuseppe Valentinelli (1865) and the Storia di Pordenone by Andrea Benedetti (1964) - have largely drawn on the papers kept in the Montereale Mantica house to document both facts and institutional and cultural contexts of this community. The aim of this work is to traces the history of the family's archive, highlighting settings and ways in which the documents where created or transferred, stored and ordered. In particular, the work analyses the impact of the personal interests and activities of Pietro Montereale Mantica (1793-1861) on the constructed nature of the collection. The investigation of the archival material has interwoven three directives. Firstly the comparison with the timeline, represented by the story of the family and of the groups, persons and institutions that, for various reasons, had participated in its events; secondly the attention to extrinsic aspects and marks that could explain the development of practices and strategies on the archive's processing; thirdly the analysis of the incidence of professional and cultural relations of Pietro Montereale Mantica on the internal structure of the fond. And it is precisely his passion for collecting and his cooperation with the Nineteenth-century world of local historiography that makes the structure of his family archive, as documented by this work, peculiar. It is, in fact, a collection that differs in various aspects from the "azienda famiglia" archive, the model of Italian's aristocratic archive in the pre-unification period, of which there are also examples in Friuli. Certainly, we find in Peter a "genealogical ganze", which is the basis of the vision of the archive as a heritage to be handed down on to future generations. But in addition to this, there is particular attention to identify in the papers of his family, and other private and public corporate bodies, the documents useful to shed light on the events and personalities of the Pordenone's history. In this context, the introduction to the inventory, exclusively based on a topographical criterion, presents an interpretation of the general structure of the collection. Besides, it identifies the archive’s parts and the interrelations between them, how the documents were acquired, the choices made by the authors of the archival process and the modifications due to the early Twentieth century's researchers. Forgotten for over fifty years, the Montereale Mantica archive is now available again to researchers. It forms the basis for the analysis and deepening of the history of this family and of the parental groups linked to it. Moreover, the comparison between the documents of this archive and other local archives will shed light on aspects of the community's history that are still unexplored.