Bruges: The Economic Nexus between Romanic and Germanic Peoples (14th-15th Centuries)
From Firenze University Press Book
Angela Orlandi University of Florence
Where to begin? […] With the incomparable philologist? With the original, insightful historian? With the enthusiastic researcher? With the indefatigable teacher? With the extraordinarily efficient organiser? With the catalyst and promoter of culture? With the great historian and entrepreneur of wines? With the persuasive orator, the citizen, the man?
These are the questions which Luigi De Rosa asked in remembering his friend Federigo Melis three years after his death (De Rosa 1976, 15). Though simple in his ways, Melis was a complex and quite fascinating figure. In what follows we will attempt to identify his most relevant traits. Federigo was born in Florence on 31 August 1914, the son of a Roman mother and a Sardinian father. Raimondo Melis served in the Italian Air Force, moving from one place of work to another, such that Federigo’s school career was quite irregular: he attended liceo scientifico in Caserta, then liceo classico in Milan, finally taking his diploma from an accounting school in Rome. He graduated from university in the capital with a degree in Business and Economics in 1939. Here he studied under Francesco della Penna, writing a dissertation in general and applied accounting on the figure of Francesco Villa.
Immediately after graduating, he took on a position as an assistant in a scientific field which was particularly congenial to him: “historical readings” in accounting. It was precisely this combination of history and the science of bookkeeping, which he mastered even in its most complex aspects, that would characterise his academic career and allow him to make a new, important type of historical source available to scholars, namely documentation originating in companies (Del Treppo 1978, 1–5). His young academic career was immediately interrupted by the approach of the Second World War. In 1940 he was enlisted as an Air Force commissary officer; on 5 June he left Naples on the Colombo steamship to take secret documents to Addis Ababa. His stay there was meant to be short, but things turned out differently when Italy entered the War: contrary to his intentions, Melis would remain in Africa until October 1944, spending a significant amount of time in prison1. Documents pertaining to his stay in Ethiopia and Kenya allow us to discover lesser known details about his person. Letters exchanged with his beloved wife Gabriella Forconi, whom he married even before graduating, reveal a man who was deeply in love, one with a vivid, intense imagination and uncommon abilities as a draughtsman2. During his years in Africa, Federigo clung to the memories of his past while dreaming of regaining his lost freedom. Caught up in a hostile environment, he desperately wished to return to Italy to see Gabriella again and continue his academic activity. As we have seen, he was released in 1944 and was able to resume his work as assistant. In 1948 he attained the university teaching qualification at the faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Rome, where he taught courses in the history of accounting. A year later he became a lecturer in Economic History at Pisa, the university to which he remained connected for the rest of his life, even when he moved to Florence. From the beginning of his research, Melis devoted intensive study to accounting, publishing one of his most original works, La storia della ragioneria (Melis 1950); the volume clearly indicates his approach to the study of history. Mario Del Treppo (2006, 187–88) defined that work as a history of culture and civilisation between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries; yet Melis in fact treated a much longer period, reaching as far back as pre-Roman antiquity, which together with the Italian High and Late Middle Ages was the era which Federigo had most closely studied. In the opening pages of the work Melis wrote: “To trace, then, the history of accounting is in a certain sense to follow the history of civilisation, given that developments in the field are conditioned by and linked to many other manifestations of the evolution of civilisation, above all in the economic sector” (Melis 1950, 3). La storia della ragioneria defined the role of company sources in Melis’s research method. If on the one hand that text reconstructed the evolution of accounting in an extremely efficient and innovative way, on the other it illustrated one of the basic ideas of all his investigations: the close connection between the development of capitalism and the evolution of the science of bookkeeping. After the publication of that work, Melis continued his indefatigable research in many Tuscan archives, working his way through mercantile correspondence and account books, such as those that belonged to Francesco Datini: indeed, these were the “Datini years” (Del Treppo 1978, 24). According to Gabriella, who followed his career and aided him in every moment of his life, Federigo was closed up from morning to night in the unhealthy basement room of Prato Cathedral where the merchant’s archive was preserved. When they didn’t spend the night at the Albergo Stella d’Italia, they took the last coach to return home, with the connivance of the driver, who would often delay the 11 pm departure time by several minutes.
DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0350–0
Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/catalogue/bruges-nesso-economico-tra-i-popoli-romanici-e-germanici-secoli-xiv-xv--bruges-the-economic-nexus-be/14511
