MOSINO FUND
The Mosino Fund is located on the garden level of the "G. Rohlfs" Museum of the Greek-Calabrian Language, in the rooms of the Bova Municipal Library, which are used as a reading room and conference room, fully accessible to the disabled and connected to the Museum by a lift.
The decision to locate the Mosino Fund in the building that also houses the Museum of the Language was dictated by the deep knowledge of the Calabrian Greek language and the relevance of the writings and studies of the professor, who defined himself as a "pro-Greek".
Professor Franco Mosino's most famous work is probably "The Odyssey Written in Reggio: Textual, Topographical, Epigraphic, Philological, Iconographic and Anthropic Evidence', for which he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.
In his publication, he claims to have solved the Homeric question, claiming not only that Homer never existed, but that it was Appa of Reggio (one of the founders of Reggio) who wrote the Odyssey.
Professor Mosino, while translating the epigrams collected by the Berlin philologist Werner Peek, noticed acrostics (vertical scripts in technical-literary jargon, widely used in ancient Greek and Roman literature, often to sign one's work) which, when applied to the Odyssey, led to the identification of the presence of five vertical scripts.
In the first 7 verses of the first canto of the Odyssey, he discovered the coded signature of the poem's author, called 'Appa'. In the course of his studies, he also came to the conclusion that the Odyssey was written, or at least conceived, in the 8th century BC by a Chalcidian storyteller (Appa) who had come to the Straits with the founders of the new colony of Magna Graecia, which founded Rhegion (today Reggio Calabria).
The theory of the Reggio-Calcidian origin of the Odyssey is also supported by the ancient sources, which point to Theagenes of Reggio as the first Western philologist and interpreter of the so-called Homeric poems, the one who interpreted the verses of the Odyssey throughout the Greek world. Moreover, many of the events narrated take place in the area of the Strait, the landscape is the Mediterranean Sea (the sea of the West), its navigability, its currents and colours, Sicily, the Aeolian Islands, home of the god of the winds, unknown to the Greeks of Asia.
Mosino also identifies the land of the Lestrigoni (the legendary people of anthropophagous giants) in the modern town of Nardo di Pace, where a 3 metre long skeleton was found.
The conclusion, according to Professor Mosino, is that the Odyssey is the epic of the Chalcidian Greeks who founded Rhegion and that Appa, who was familiar with the Iliad written several centuries earlier, continued the story, choosing Odysseus as his character and the foundation of Reggio and its towns as the background.
ORIGIN
The Mosino Fund was donated to the Bova Community by Prof. Franco Mosino (1932-2015), a Calabrian linguist who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 for his studies on the origins of the Odyssey. The collection, donated by the professor during his lifetime, is owned by his heirs, who have always supported the Municipality of Bova so that it can be stored, exhibited, made available to scholars and admirers, and preserved.
It consists of about 5074 volumes and journals. A large part of Prof. Franco Mosino's library is devoted to studies, philology, history, classical literature, the history of Calabria and, above all, linguistics, with particular reference to medieval and modern Ancient Greek, Greek-Calabrian and Greek-Salentine. The specificity of the subject matter of most of the texts in the Fund makes the Franco Mosino Fund one of the most important collections of books on linguistic minorities in Italy.
CATALOGUE
AND SECTIONS
The project "Biblioteca diffusa nel Borgo di Bova tra natura e cultura" (diffuse library in Borgo di Bova for nature and culture) has continued to complete the existing cataloguing, which had stopped at number 4554. With the continuation and cataloguing of the remaining 520, the Mosino Fund's book heritage0 totals 5074 books and periodicals.
The digitisation of some of the existing texts was carried out on the basis of the rarity of the Greek texts, while preserving the correspondence of the late professor. Of course, all this can only be put online with the prior consent of the heirs and various recipients.
- OLD BOOKS SECTION: documents dated before 1830.
- RARE BOOKS SECTION: rare editions.
- ROHLFS SECTION: Documents from the collection of which Gerhard Rohlfs is the author, editor or contributor. Also included are texts written about Gerhard Rohlfs and contributions to periodicals.
- MOSINO SECTION: contains the author's bibliography, contributions to conferences, journals, newspapers or specific studies.
- PHOTOCOPIES SECTION: documents belonging to Mosino of which he had only photocopied and also bound copies.
- CALABRIA SECTION: represents a large part of the papers.
- PERIODICALS: indicates the periodicals section.
- OTHER DOCUMENTS: all the other documents.