Archive Proximity

[Mark Knowles]

I would be, although I am visiting Italy (Torino) for only a few days in late April/early May. I would be open to more long term research, and I do have a place to stay, but am currently unemployed.

It seems as if the Biblioteca di Storia e Cultura del Piemonte “Giuseppe Grosso” in Turin contains within it the Archivio della famiglia Carrone di San Tommaso which contains within it Milanese enciphered letters. The earliest of which seems to be dated to 1455. So this is rather later than I am interested in. However, it does indicate that ciphers can appear in unexpected places.

I will investigate where the best archives/libraries to hunt for early 15th century ciphers in Turin are likely to be. I must confess I am not hugely optimistic about what there is to be found in Turin, but who knows. Feel free to study online inventories to see if you spot anything interesting.

When it comes to archives near Turin I suppose there could be something in Archives in Asti or Vercelli or some other nearby city/town.

If you look in:

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It lists various enciphered letters from 1455 onwards in their archive. Search in the document for "cifr" then you can find the various letters. Of course, in Italian cifrata means enciphered. (That at the time "zifra" was the most common spelling of the word "cipher", but spelling wasn't very consistent so "cyfra", "ziffera" and a variety of other variants could be used to spell the word "cipher"/"cifrario")

If these letters were from 20 years earlier(1435+) they would be like gold dust to me, but being from 1455+ makes them much less interesting to me.

The most interesting letter of these appears to be:

"Lettera in gran parte cifrata di Giovanni Filippo Fieschi al duca di Genova."

All the other letters are in communication with the Milanese. However this letter is in communication with the Genoese. There are lots of examples of Milanese ciphers from the 2nd half of the 15th century. However there are very very few examples of Genoese ciphers from the 15th century. So, there might be some interest in this letter.

This is an example of a nice inventory as 1) it lists every document 2) it is in a digital form so you can search inside it. Unfortunately, lots of inventories are 1) much more vague just listing the period covered and a rough idea of the kind of documents contained there 2) are not in digital form even handwritten in some cases, so without OCRing the document oneself one cannot search inside it for references to ciphers. The fact that the inventory is nice explains why I was able to locate the letters within it.

However, maybe you can find some earlier enciphered letters in Turin with luck. You might want to study the inventories to see if you can find something interesting.