On Tuesday 28 April 2026, at 5:30 p.m., the Conference Room of the Museum of Natural History in Foggia, located at viale Giuseppe Di Vittorio 31, will host the meeting entitled "Scripta Capitana. Documents, Materials and Historical Events in Medieval Capitanata".

Tommaso Palermo and Alessandro De Troia will be the speakers at this event, which forms part of the ninth edition of the Local History Conversations organised by the “Special Collections” Section of the La Magna Capitana Library.

During the evening, three reproductions will be examined: several pages from the registry of Frederick II’s chancellery dating from 1239–40, on cotton paper, containing a reference to the Incoronata; a parchment document from 1255 bearing the seal of Pope Alexander IV and addressed to a feudal lord in Capitanata; and a parchment document from 1284 bearing the signature of a Saracen from Lucera.

The meeting will also address the production, use, and restoration of parchment in the Middle Ages, as well as the discipline of Diplomatics.

Tommaso Palermo, a teacher, long devoted to historical and artistic research and an independent scholar, is one of the contributors to the quarterly journal Diomede. His work focuses mainly on the bombings of Foggia and the Allied occupation in Capitanata, to which he devoted a book published in 2013 entitled: Foggia, from the Darkness of ’43 to Rebirth. He is co-founder and secretary of the committee "A Monument in Memory of the Victims of ’43 in Foggia APS" and works as a guide at the museum managed by the Museum of Memory ’43 committee. He is also a member of the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento.

Alessandro De Troia, who has long been passionate about history, began in 2007 to work on historical re-enactment and experimental archaeology, with particular reference to the thirteenth century and the Swabian period in Capitanata. In 2012 he won the Augustale d’Oro prize for the essay Christian and Muslim Presence in Thirteenth-Century Lucera. New Hypotheses and Research Perspectives and has published in various academic and popular journals. He is the administrator of a blog on the culture and society of Lucera. In 2022 he founded the social promotion association Gens Capitanatae. At the University of Basilicata, he became an adjunct professor in the doctoral programme in History, Culture and Knowledge of Mediterranean Europe from Antiquity to the Contemporary Age.

Palermo and De Troia are credited with identifying a late medieval marble relief depicting Saint Francis of Assisi, by the renowned sculptor Tino di Camaino, owned by the Capuchin Fathers of Foggia and studied in collaboration with Professor Emerita Maria Stella Calò Mariani of the University of Bari. This discovery was also the subject of a Local History Conversation last year.

Free admission, subject to seat availability.

The series will conclude on 7 May with a conversation dedicated to the history of Foggia’s presence at the Sanremo Festival, curated by Maurizio De Tullio.

Visit the Library’s website (https://lamagnacapitana.regione.puglia.it/) and social media channels to keep up to date with all the latest news.

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