Françeskanët Venecianë në Shqipërinë e shekullit XVII
Venetian Franciscans in 17th Century Albania

Summary/Abstract: Presented here are three texts by Franciscan missionaries from Veneto who worked in Albania in the 17th century, recently recovered in the Archives of the Franciscan Province of Venice: works by friars Angelo da Bergamo, Cherubino da Valle di Bono (Trento) and Leone da Cittadella (Padua). Only the first one was partially known, the other two are completely unpublished: all three are in the final stages of transcription and publication. They have very different characteristics from the reports that the Prefects of the Missions sent to the offices of Propaganda Fide in Rome, in that they were conceived as small "autobiographies" with which to make known their life experience and the situation of the country where the brothers were sent to work. From this point of view, they have many vivid narrative implications. The recovered texts are precious documents for the history of Albanian society at the time: first of all from an anthropological perspective, with descriptions of customs, habits, and the health situation (frequent waves of malaria and plague); from this point of view, they complement the documentation of the official reports to Rome, already known. Compared to these, however, they have an added and even more precious value, in that they contribute to the reconstruction of the linguistic history of the country. They contain Albanian language passages (numerous are those in the text by Leone da Cittadella), because they contain excerpts of interviews and interrogations that took place between the friars and the local authorities; therefore, expressions in the Albanian language also appear. The most important among them is the example of the term schipetar, which appears a few decades earlier (1639) than the year known so far (1702). Their importance therefore goes far beyond the limited interest in religious matters; in the future, it is believed, they could be the subject of interdisciplinary study.

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