Cardinal Giuseppe Garampi An eighteenth-century pioneer in indexing

Abstract

The Vatican Secret Archive is a treasure-trove of material, a mirror reflecting, in one all-embracing chronological and geographical sweep, the multifarious aspects of papal activity through the course of many centuries. But Aladdin in this cave needs to be able to find his treasure. So for him the Index Room is the Holy of Holies. This article tells the story of the prime begetter of the Index Room, Cardinal Giuseppe Garampi (d. 1792) and the transformation of his 820,000 ‘slips in a shoebox’, intended for the writing of a history of the Church, into the Schedario Garampi, an indispensable tool for archival research.