Traces of Hungarians in Italy
We follow in the footsteps of giants… The research of documents related to Hungary (the so-called hungarica) which are held in Italian archives was initiated by Hungarians forced to emigrate after the War of Independence in 1848–49, such as Baron Albert Nyáry and Lipót Óváry, who then paved the way for the best of Hungarian historians: Vilmos Fraknói, Albert Berzeviczy, Iván Nagy and many others. In 1915, when Italy entered World War I against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the work came to a halt for a longer period. A century later the Vestigia research group, established at the Faculty of Humanities of the Pázmány Péter Catholic University since 2010, is committed to continue the project with the same enthusiasm, but relying on more modern methods, collecting digitized copies and organizing them into an online database. The present virtual exhibition marks a new milestone, as the researchers of Vestigia will hand over more than a thousand of digitized and identified documents from Mantua – following those from Milan and Modena – to the National Archives of Hungary, which will enable the public audience to learn about the new significant results of the hungarica researches in Italy.
The documents presented at the virtual exhibition reflect the vast temporal, spatial and thematic variety of more than 3,000 documents and works of art related to Hungarians collected so far. We hope that the selected documents preserved abroad reveal previously unknown facts of Hungarian history, and provide interesting and in many cases significant additional information to a number of various historical events. Thus, the National Archives of Hungary continues to consider the research of hungarica a priority, with an emphasis on the exploration and processing of the hungarica documents preserved in Italy in order to make them accessible to everyone interested in history and in Italian-Hungarian relations.