Professor Giulio Sapelli has kindly donated part of his book collection of study, research and intellectual development to the library of the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, an institution to which he has had a thirty-year relationship. Within this legacy, the project “The Library of Professor Giulio Sapelli” conceived and curated by Dr. Cristina Tedesco, has made accessible not only the catalogue of the collection, but also generated a digitalization campaign focused on annotated pages from his books, manuscript notes, and study related evidence linked to Professor Sapelli, which have been and acquired for their documentary and archival value. Professor Sapelli’s books are now accessible through this portal, which enriches the already significant book and research heritage of FEEM, and ensures that the work of Giulio Sapelli reaches future generations of intellectuals.

Born in Turin, Giulio Sapelli was a full professor of Economic History at the University of Milan and a lecturer and researcher at the London School of Economics, the University of Barcelona and the University of Buenos Aires. In his long study and consultancy activity, he collaborated with numerous companies and production entities, where he carried out managerial training activities at Olivetti, Finmeccanica, Telecom and ENI, of which he was a member of the Board of Directors from 1996 to 2002. An expert in cooperative movements and Italian economic growth from the post-war period to the present day, since 1994 he has been an emeritus researcher at the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei. Between 1993 and 1995 he represented Italy at Transparency International, an organization that acts against international economic corruption. From 2000 to 2001 he was President of the Fondazione Monte dei Paschi di Siena and from 2002 to 2009 a member of the Board of Directors of Unicredit Banca d’Impresa. Between 1980 and 2003 he served as Scientific Director of the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.

Professor Sapelli’s library, like ones of intellectuals who use books as tools for work and relationships, presents itself as a space that weighs not only for the material heritage it contains, but above all because it is a space on which knowledge, research and meetings figuratively gravitate. The paper material that constitutes it, clearly by virtue of the acceleration of the Earth’s gravity, makes it weigh, but the library heavy, possesses gravitas for the energy impressed in it, an energy that continues to express. This project is ultimately only the most recent manifestation of the value and energy intrinsic to a space filled with books.

This energy is in the condition to weigh, as large physical and natural spaces tend to feel heavy, even if they have no mass other than the air they contain. The large natural expanses of land and water crushed by horizons devoid of anthropic elements weigh; the spaces constrained by the peaks of large mountain ranges weigh; urban spaces weigh when perceived from perspectives that exceed the limits of the human; sometimes certain built environments weigh for their volumetric nature or their symbolic and iconographic value. Among the latter, there are large and small libraries, real or imagined, of those who in different eras have lived in continuous pondering of the logos, which is not only a word or verb, but true thought, reasoning, speech, and above all, knowledge in its highest form.

Among the many book spaces that come to mind are the great Alexandria’s library, those of the medieval scriptoria, the modern humanist studioli, or that of Babel conceived by Borges. Among these, thinking and reading Professor Sapelli, comes to mind the one imagined by Antonello da Messina in the extraordinary oil on panel San Girolamo in his study..

Painted by the artist around 1475, the space of the library of the saintly scholar and translator of the Bible into Latin is represented as a metaphysical space, with an iconographic rendering pervaded by an amber luminosity, which enlivens and shows the gravitas of this space of study and research, and of intellectual elaboration aimed at the logos. The space of the library/study appears open to the encounter although enclosed within a large ecclesiastical architecture. From the windows of this architecture, we can glimpse the surrounding landscape to remind us how the sacred logos is there to shape and unify the world of nature and the world of culture.

 

On the shelves, on the desk, and on the platform of the library of San Girolamo, as imagined by Antonello da Messina, books and utensils together with potted plants and specimens of the animal world act as reminders of human and divine knowledge opened to experience. The holy hermit/scholar, father of the Church, is therefore at the same time isolated but also made accessible: the steps in the foreground are an invitation to take part in this space of complexity, in which, in the opaque transparency of a natural light but filtered by the artifice, one witnesses the moment of gaining knowledge, like an instantaneous crystallization stopped in the complex viscosity of an amber gem. In the library of Antonello da Messina’s San Girolamo, as well as in those of scholars such as Professor Sapelli, one can sit down and observe the flowing of thought, and, as if sitting on the banks of one of the great rivers of the history of thought, one can virtually meet, dialogue and discuss with women and men from everywhere and from many eras.

 

Professor Sapelli’s library resides now in three collections open to the public. The books donated to FEEM are in fact only a part of his library. FEEM’s bequest includes books related to the professor’s research during his years of collaboration with the Foundation. The bequest reflects the activities conducted by the scholar after being called to work for the Foundation in 1994 by Domenico Siniscalco, when he was its director between 1989 and 2001. Since the mid-1990s, FEEM has been Professor Sapelli’s chosen home, not only for the research conducted there, but also for the further enrichment of his considerable library, which has also grown in the last years thanks to his relationships with the branches of Telecom, Finmeccanica, and Avio in South America, where he worked for many years, teaching at universities such as UBA, the University of Buenos Aires, in several PhD programmes in World Economic History. The materials collected in Professor Sapelli’s FEEM library also reflect the task assigned to him by the Minister of Finance to reform the statute of the Fondazione dei Monti dei Paschi di Siena, in the period from 2000 to 2002, and his Presidency of Meta Modena from 2002 to 2005, the Presidency of the Audit Committee of Unicredit Corporate Banking, of which he was a member of the board of directors for approximately six years.

 

The second bequest comes from Professor Sapelli’s personal library, collected in his residences in Milan between 1980 and 2020, and consisting of approximately 50,000 volumes originally kept in Via Santa Lucia and Via Porta Tenaglia. A significant part of this library was donated to the parish of San Marco, which oversaw its sale to the Association of Popular Banks, now based in Piazza del Gesù in Rome. The library, open to the public, is named after Giorgio Zanotto, a political and managerial protagonist in the history of Italian Popular Banks. This library includes publications relating to economic science, Marxist economics, and Trotskyist politics, a school of thought of which Sapelli has been a convinced follower since the 1960s, although he has now distanced himself from the political and theoretical arena of that sector of study.

 

The third of the bequests now resides in the library of the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, which Professor Sapelli directed from 1980 to 2002. In twenty-two years of research and curatorial work for the Annali of the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, this third library collected publications relating to research sections of the Foundation, such as Italian history, economic history, political history, the history of international workers’ movements, as well as artistic and antiquarian acquisitions, artistic and art history publications, collections of poetry, Spanish and French literature, as well as editions of texts on Ezra Pound and Thomas Elliot with related philological and literary criticism.

 

Within this very rich heritage of books and knowledge, FEEM digitization and cataloguing project, promoted at the time of the donation of professor Sapelli’s library, allows us to cross a new frontier for the long lasting research career of one of the protagonists of Italian Economy in the second half of the twentieth century. Thanks to this project, we come across books with underlined, annotated pages, with passages of text circled, and with pages folded at the margins and along their length. The books in the hands and under the gaze of their reader become witnesses in the space of the library and, if questioned together with the scholar, lead to exploring the fragments of thought embedded in the amber memory of this bookish space, always offering new opportunities to overcome the limits of knowledge and perhaps to experience that transcendence so central to Professor Sapelli’s research.

Starting from the passage underlined by Professor Sapelli on page 543 of one of the books that are part of the bequest, that of Ernesto De Martino, La fine del mondo. Contributo all’analisi delle apocalissi culturali, [Nuova edizione a cura di Giordana Charuty, Daniel Fabre e Marcello Massenzi], Einaudi, 2019 (2016), the writer was moved to ask the professor if he could comment on what had prompted him to use that text in this way. The professor then told us in December 2025:

 

“This book has accompanied my life for it has written in it my path to Jungian individuation, which begins in Turin and Ivrea when meeting Franco Momigliano, Francesco Novara and Nicola Abbagnano through Olivetti and the “Quaderni di Sociologia” then printed by the Taylor Publisher, who was none other than the wife of the great Abbagnano, the wealthy Mrs. Taylor, a beautiful lady from the Turin hills, to whom I often brought the proofs of the magazine that Luciano Gallino – who then directed the Olivetti Sociology Centre in Ivrea – gave me to deliver to Abbagnano who almost never received me; but I was welcomed, instead, by the delightful and beautiful American lady, an American like there are no more today and can only be seen in the Hollywood films of the time. I lived the world of Chiodi, of Paci in Turin at the end of the sixties of the twentieth century (I was born in 1947 and therefore I was very young …) and I nourished myself on the battle then underway between Einaudi’s Zhdanovists led by Calvino and the “Boringherians” of the anthropological-existentialist near to Pavese, who contaminated Marxist economics with the study of psychoanalysis, on anti-Crocean sociology, on the philosophy that could be breathed in reading a Proust who was the rejection of popular neo-realism, to arrive at phenomenology and the reading of Balbo, Del Noce and Marx and the criticism of Hegel’s legal studies.
For a boy who had just finished night school and graduated from the Bodoni professional photography institute in the suburbs, everything was a dream and a continuous transcendence that gave joy and beauty to life. I know what transcendence is. After my introduction to work, I had privately studied middle school and in six months I had studied teacher training in order to enroll in the Faculty of Education (Literature and Philosophy was impossible for me despite the attempts made at the time by Edoardo Sanguineti, to whom I owe a lot in my education – the PCI was a marvel for education), after the stupid degree in economics with Professor Onorato Castellino (a great man… Teacher of Fornero, sic!) and then landed in studies at the Faculty of Education, I reached the shores of history and philosophy studies, with the Masters Guido Quazza and Massimo Salvadori and Angelo Passeirn d’Entreves – with Massimo Mila my beloved teacher – under the watchful eye of Franco Momigliano and Don Rossi. Don Rossi was the architect of my entire transformation-transcendence: the priest who always followed me like a father follows a son, after having saved me from night school and accompanied me by the hand under the blessing of Monsignor Pellegrino, a great scholar of Christian Latin literature, then a beloved and very good cardinal, who followed me lovingly, accompanying me by the hand in my private exams and in the free and passionate study that he imposed on me with an iron hand in velvet gloves and auspicious prayers and rosaries.”

 

This brief introduction to the project “The Library of Professor Giulio Sapelli” and this little dive into transcendence, we hope, will be able to provide an idea of the richness and infinite possibilities of knowledge that lie within this now even more public heritage, a mine of gems, metaphorically emulating the Amber Room in Catherine’s Palace, the summer residence of the Russian tsars in Tsarskoye Selo near St. Petersburg, restored to its integrity in the pomp of a Russia that is increasingly neo-imperialist today.