«I’ve always imagined heaven as a kind of library»
(Jorge Luis Borges)
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She was a Warrior, in name and in fact. Everything we know about her we learned through her diary written night by night, between anxieties and fears, adrenaline and tears, during the years of war, looting and devastation. She was a Warrior Warrior and between 1941 and 1944, as director of the National Library of Naples and superintendent of the libraries of Campania and Calabria, she saved thousands and thousands of books, securing our paper memory.
Naples owes a lot to this book lover who moved with her family to the Campania capital from Cortona, in the province of Arezzo, where she was born in 1902. In Naples Guerriera had obtained a diploma in paleography and archival doctrines from the State Archives and in In 1926 she graduated with honors in Classics. Then, in 1928, she joined the National Library as a volunteer, which had recently moved to the Royal Palace. During the war years, Guerrieri’s commitment was completely absorbed by the protection of the bibliographic heritage not only owned by the National team, threatened by bombings, looting and fires. In 1938, on behalf of the director Gino Tamburini, she took care of the preparation of the Exhibition of Bibliographical Relics. She was convinced, Warrior, that only direct knowledge of codes, manuscripts and ancient printed editions would constitute an effective tool for forging the civil and cultural conscience, especially of young people.
The bombs shattered that dream. From 42 until the end of the conflict, Guerriera took care of the transport of book materials to the various shelters located throughout the Campania region: part of the catalogs were transferred inland, waiting for better times. The trepidations, hopes and fears of those years are revived, in particular, in Events of the National Library of Naples: war diary 1943-1945, published in 1980.
Warrior is tireless. She saved manuscripts and incunabula from the bombing by transferring them first to the monastery of Montevergine and then to the abbey palace of Loreto. She extends the protection and defense action to other volumes which, with 1437 cases, she has transferred to off-site shelters also in Teano, Calvi Risorta, San Giorgio del Sannio and Aversa. A civilian heroine: Guerrieri manages to firmly oppose first the Germans who intended to appropriate part of the material, then the Allied troops who also attempted to seize the books located in the shelters and tried to requisition some rooms of the National Library.
In February 1945 the National Library repurchased all the material and fully resumed public service. Guerrieri, who successfully completed the mission of saving the immense book heritage that had been entrusted to her, was appointed to the steering committee of the National Center for the Single Catalog of Italian Libraries and for Bibliographic Information. Guerrieri implemented the catalog general alphabetical catalogue, which then merged into the first collective catalog of Italian libraries. In 1967 she retired, but she was able to continue her activity through studies, conferences, essays and volumes. She was elected member of the Pontaniana Academy of Naples, of the Etruscan Academy of Cortona, of Cosentina, of the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples of which she was president from 1973 to 1975. In 1968 she was awarded the gold medal by the Ministry of Public Education as a meritorious of school, culture and art and in 1976 she was awarded the title of Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. The Book Warrior who saved our paper city from the bombs died in Cortona, in the province of Arezzo, in 1980. In 2023 the monumental Reading Room of the National Library of Naples will be named after her.
Naples, it is August 4, 1943. The city is hit from high altitude with incendiary bombs which cause the almost total destruction of the fourteenth-century church of Santa Chiara. Naples suffers 43 hours of bombing with over 20 thousand deaths and 80% of the buildings destroyed. The bombs of 4 August 1943 also devastated the now empty rooms of the National Library. The special collections on the second floor, enclosed in 1271 boxes, were safe from raids because they were sheltered, at the time, in the entrance hall of the building, adapted as a shelter. For the 75 boxes containing the Herculaneum papyri – as Maria Cecaro writes in the introduction to Vicende della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, war diary 1943-1945 – a special crypt was created on the ground floor.
The immense heritage of the “homeland memory”, forged by centuries and centuries of history and culture, would have suffered incalculable damage also in the following month, when the Germans fleeing from Naples literally scorched earth of what had been stubbornly preserved, cataloged and preserved throughout the centuries. Thus, alongside the figure of the energetic Guerriera Guerrieri, we must remember that of Count Riccardo Filangieri, superintendent of the Royal Archives of Naples, who on 29 September 1943 had written, in vain, to the German military command of Nola with the aim of saving the conspicuous heritage of ‘Archive, historical memory of the entire South of Italy, deposited as a precaution in Villa Montesano near San Paolo Belsito; it highlighted its purely cultural character, the enormous interest in Italian and European history, in German scholars themselves as the source of Germanism in Italy.
But these writings, the most precious, selected and transferred, were burned on 30 September 1943 by the retreating Germans coinciding with the Four Days of Naples, together with part of the collections of the Gaetano Filangieri Civic Museum, after the much damage caused to the complex monumental Benedictine monument of Saints Severino and Sossio, seat of the Royal Archives of Naples, to the sections of the Divine Love, of Palazzo Loffredo in Pizzofalcone, of Palazzo Letizia in Caserta, of the air raids and the explosion of the ship Caterina Costa in port, and of the writings – suffice it cite the archives of the Court of Auditors, the Military Tribunals and the Secretariat of War and Navy, of the Public Debt – and after the fire of the University of 12 September 1943, which cost the loss of the library of the Royal Society of Naples .
«If I now think that the entire patrimony of the government libraries is saved due to the love and devotion of Miss Guerrieri, my soul is filled with gratitude», wrote Benedetto Croce. «She took care of transporting him to distant places to protect him from bombings and fires. She always personally accompanied the truck drivers who transported the boxes to ensure that nothing was lost. It transported them back to Naples with this participation that was not only direct but personal.” Precisely thanks to the interest of Don Benedetto, in 1922 the transfer of the Library to the Royal Palace was decided. Before then the citadel of books was housed in the Palazzo degli Studi, now home to the Archaeological Museum.
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