Conoscere per conservare e valorizzare. Il Fondo De Beaumont-Bonelli dell'Archivio Jatta a Ruvo di Puglia

In the large panorama of the so-called Puglia storica (‘historical Puglia’), the Bonelli family, then De Beaumont-Bonelli, had the opportunity to develop a complex housing system experienced by its different members as a single theatre of social and urban events. The remarkable and derived palimpsest, especially between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, still re-emerges with unpublished proofs in the floor plans and in documents of the homonymous private archive, a complex documentary, unified to that of the Jatta family of Ruvo di Puglia, located in this small town, which is today the seat of the homonymous National Museum. The recognition on a consistent and unprecedented documentary heritage as an indispensable tool for following deepings and analysis of the historical, cultural and artistic complex processes is the main object of the research, carried out on a ‘survival’ case, perhaps unique in its genre for the Apulian territory. In fact, the investigations to date allow comparisons not only with other residential realities, which are often background for artistic and antiquarian flows directed from the South towards Naples and Europe, but also with early precise studies for some restoration interventions, in particular, starting from the alarming situations of the conservation status, such as the almost lost "Villa del giardino di Sant'Antonio", owned by De Beaumont in Taranto, also known as Villa Perìpato, and the Villa dei Bonelli in Barletta, which, together with the park, develops an area of over twenty thousand square meters. The proposal starts from the university research project "L’Anello mancante. Il fondo De Beaumont-Bonelli dell’Archivio Jatta a Ruvo e le relazioni della Puglia storica con Roma e l’area Padana", funded by the Department of Letters, Languages, Arts. Italianistics and Comparative Cultures (LELIA), with funds provided by the University of Bari 'Aldo Moro' (PI: Andrea Leonardi, University of Bari 'Aldo Moro'. Members of the research group: Giampaolo Angelini, University of Pavia; Luisa Derosa, University of Bari 'Aldo Moro'; Giuseppe De Sandi, University of Bari 'Aldo Moro' – PhD student; Rosalina Grumo, University of Bari 'Aldo Moro'; Antonella Pompilio, National Archive of Bari)