by Francesca Rocchi
Since the first half of the 19th century, the shelves of the Biblioteca Casanatense have held ms. 615, a precious codex that, spanning a period of time from the end of the Middle Ages to the dawn of the Napoleonic era, bears witness to a cross-section of the history of one of the oldest and most important guilds in Urbe, that of the innkeepers and tavernkeepers.
Ms. 615 can rightly be considered a unicum, as it contains the original statutes of the guild together with a large number of documents of various kinds, such as original confirmations and approvals of Senators and Conservators of Rome, signed by prothonotaries and notaries; inventories, authentic copies of petitions, papal documents (motu proprio and brevi), cardinal coats of arms and full-page miniatures, all stratified over three centuries (1481-1780).
The Roman guilds were subject to the control of public power by the Holy See to the extent that they benefited from the protectorate of cardinals, and the spiritual sphere was so strong that they placed themselves under the protection of patron saints. 
Each guild had its own church or chapel as a meeting place, in which the guild’s Liber statutorum was usually kept, i.e. a collection of deontological, behavioural and organisational rules necessary to regulate the guilds’ work. While the Liber statutorum of the Corporazione degli osti e tavernieri di Roma constitutes the most important part of Ms. 615 (there are actually two drafts of the statutes present, dated 1481, cc. 1r-25r, table II, and 1586, cc. 56r-64r), it is accompanied by a miscellany of documents, little studied, that offer stimulating research points, especially from a palaeographic and diplomatic point of view. In fact, it is worth remembering that the confirmations and approvals signed by Roman prothonotaries and notaries provide a rich archive to which reference can be made regarding the figures of Rome’s senators and conservators, who, from the end of the 15th century to the end of the 18th century, signed individual documents, affixing under-paper seals of their own or those of the Roman Senate. Very interesting data emerged from the codicological investigation, some of which enabled the reconstruction of the manuscript’s history.
It is therefore a composite codex organised (chronologically and logically), consisting of 123 membranous and papery papers, many of which were left blank. An in-depth analysis of the structure of the volume revealed as many as fifteen autonomous text units within it, highlighting its complex collation, which was only realised at the end of the 18th century during the binding stage, probably by the bookbinder Giovanni Gorini, who would have assembled those same once loose papers.
The texts in the code were written over a very long period of time, using different types of graphics. Latin palaeography traditionally delimits its field of enquiry around the 15th century, with littera antiqua and cancelleresca italica, placing the scripts disseminated during the 16th century in ‘unexplored’ and much-debated territory, especially with regard to the scope of definition. These are in fact ‘hybrid’ scripts, i.e. non-canonised scripts with strong ‘personal’ graphic tendencies: they characterise a large part of Ms. 615, such as the semigotica of the cards (Table VII), the cancelleresca italica (Table X) and the bastarda italiana (Tables XIV and XIX), as defined by Giorgio Cencetti. There are also canonised and bookish scripts such as the Italian Gothic, known as rotunda (Tables II and III) and the manner scripts used in the mid-18th century by expert calligraphers (Tables XVI and XX).