Life stages
Tracking back Giovanni Spano’s life stages, we get to know a quite peculiar detail of his formation: his vocation to archaeology was not original but residual.
Actually, when he was sixteen, he followed with great interest the excavation made by Antonio Cano, a friar and architect skilled in using explosives (Della Marmora did not agree with this: he pretended to be an architect and an archaeologist for he lived in Rome for some time), who, instructed by Queen Mary Theresa, had started an excavation campaign in 1819 spring in Turris Libissonis (Porto Torres) in the site of king Barbaro’s Palace, finding out the base of the prefect M. Ulpius Victor. Everything they found (statues, mosaics, writings on stones) was put on the stairs and inside the teachers’ hall of the Theology University in Sassari, where Spano presumably spent most of the days of his youth. Thus, this passion was forever in him, even though he began an ecclesiastical career.
Giovanni Spano
was born in Ploaghe the eight of March 1803; his parents were Giovanni Maria
Spanu Lizos, landowner and farmer, and Giovanna Lucia Figoni Lizos. When he was
nine he was taken by his older brother to Sassari, where he began his formation
in Scolopi College, later in Seminary to study grammar and rhetoric, logic and
mathematics, until he took the title of magister artium liberalium on 6th
November, 1820, when he was 17 years old.
Later
on, continuing with his studies, doubtful about choosing between Medicine and
Law, he opted for the ecclesiastical career. Living in the Seminary, he attended
the four-years course of Theology in Sassari where, in 1825, on 14th
July he graduated. The old University ceremonial can be somehow seen by reading
his work Iniziazione ai miei studi: the examining commission, formed by
eleven members, among whom there were the professor of dogmatic theology, father
Thomas Tealdi, and Saint Apollinare parish priest Philip Arrica, from Ploaghe,
teacher of moral theology and later on Bishop in Alghero, was presided over by
the Archbishop Carl Thomas Arnosio. The teacher of Holy Scriptures, father
Anthony de Quesada, put on Giovanni’s head the four-pointed cap, dressed him
with his gown, slipped a golden ring on his ring-finger and called him
princeps theologorum. Young Spano swore his oath and thanked the commission
with versi leonini.
The following year he found himself in an unpleasant situation. Appointed teacher in the Normal School of Sassari, he was in some great trouble. The classes were crowded with students, the furniture was little: the lessons were taken in a scarcely lighted storeroom, where there were only two desk rows for the students and a little desk with a chair for himself. Moreover, his salary was not very much. He would have been teaching in Sassary for three years, trying to modify this situation and do his teacher’s duty as well as he could: in private he taught older students, who later were sent back to their class. In March 1827 he was ordained priest, and in 1830 he got the title of doctor in liberal arts and Philosophy, using a thesis entitled De stellis fixis (About fixed stars). One year later, on 13th June he sailed from Longosardo to get to Roma, where he arrived on 20th August. When he got to the city, he found a confused situation: due to the great ’800 revolution movements, the appointment of Pope Gregorio XVI, and, above all, the imminent founding of Rome Republic, “the people throw stones at every priest they see”. On this purpose it’s necessary to mention a quite unpleasant incident occurred to him. On the first day he was in Rome, after visiting Saint Peter Basilica, he was grazed by a boulder thrown by someone above. Terrified, he asked some passer-by how to come back to his inn.
The next days, after taking a room in Apollinare inn, he registered in the Roman Archgymnasium, that is La Sapienza, where he began to study Hebraic, Caldic and Syrian–Caldic languages. His teachers were the abbot Andrea Molza from Modena, teacher of Hebraic and Caldic and Syrian–Caldic languages, professor Nicholas Wiseman, teacher of Hebraic, De Dominicis and Emilio Sarty, teacher of Greek, and Nibby, professor of Archaeology.
His living in Rome made him make new experiences about archaeology: every day he would go to Navona square, “the store of ancient things”, to buy coins, lead pieces, old pictures, books and other antiquities.
In 1834, on request by marquis Crosa, Secretary of Sardinian States, he went to Turin to take his Holy Scriptures examinations. Thus, examined by Amedeo Peyron, professor of Eastern Languages in Turin University, on 17th May, 1834, after he was given the patents, he became professor of Holy Scriptures and Eastern Languages in Cagliari Royal University, with scarce satisfaction of the ones who elected him; actually the scholar, instead of spending his time with Holy Scriptures, dedicated to archaeology trifles, to the useless folk dialect. During 1835-1836 academic year, it occurred to him to meet General Alberto della Marmora, who, with General Carlo Decandia, in 1835, was in Cagliari to begin the trigonometric studies of Sardinia. A great person, who was the first Secretary of Sardinia when the Sardinian-Piedmont Kingdom was founded. Della Marmora had previously struggled to protect Sardinian monuments. This meeting was bound to give birth to a deep friendship: the scholar was ready to help his friend, assisting the General in his researches and his publications thanks to Spano’s knowledge of Hebraic and Phoenician language. Anyway, they had some conflict of ideas. We are referring particularly to the different opinion about the use and the employ of the Nuraghes: Spano thought of them as houses, Della Marmora as graves. Another conflict was about General’s weird friendships and his mistakes made by buying fake Sardinian–Phoenician idol statues.
During 1835 holidays, Spano seriously dedicated to Sardinian antiquities. Being free from his university teaching, he could wander about in the countryside searching for the antiquities he had admired, back when he was a child, in the university room of Sassari. At those times, the holidays in Cagliari University were the longest around Sardinian-Piedmont Kingdom because, due to malaria, the university had to close on the first day of May, with great advance to the other ones. So he explored the southern part of the island, copying and putting in order the ancient inscriptions of Cagliari Campidano, and visited ancient Caralis necropolis and the Roman amphitheatre.
In 1836 he went to Verona to visit the Amphitheatre, and in 1838 he studied Sardinian dialects.
In Cagliari, the meeting with Lodovico Baille, University censor, librarian and director of the archaeological museum, allowed Spano to increase his passion for archaeology, and in 1839, after his friend’s death, to take in his hands the direction of University Library and reform some rules: he permitted to the boys who entered the library in winner to keep their hat on their head, modifying the rule which said the students were to have their heads uncovered. Ploaghese priest, however, realising that he was not able to direct such a complex institution, travelled to Pisa, Parma, Modena and Milan to watch how the other libraries worked. He would act this way later on, too, when he would be elected Headmaster of Royal Boarding-school and Saint Therese College (1854) and later vice–chancellor of Cagliari University (1857). We can see in him a will new for Sardinian people: to collect documents, to admit their mistakes, to try different ways to make up for Sardinian history centuries of lost time. This is a peculiarity of Spano’s, he is an eclectic scholar: he wrote many works about Sardinian language (Sardinian national spelling, Cagliari, 1840; Sardinian–Italian and Italian–Sardinian Dictionary, Cagliari, 1851), and several philological publications. In the beginning, however, his interests were not so heterogeneous. He travelled around Sardinia, for instance, to gather information in order to write his Sardinian Dictionary, and, at the same time, he took an advantage for himself since he could see monuments, inscriptions, nuraghes.
In 1842, he left the direction of the University Library, which was given to Pietro Martini. So he visited Sulcis, Iglesias, Carloforte and St. Antioco, where he found Phoenician inscriptions, Roman coins and “marble and trachyte small temples, between which an Isis’ one”. Two years later, in 1844, failed his experience of university teacher, after being exempted form teaching by Studies Authority and the censor (he would finally loose his job in 1845), he accepted what archbishop Emanuele Marongiu Nurra was offering him, that is the mansion of canonical in Villaspeciosa, the smallest and most wretched sinecure in Cagliari Diocese. The income was very little, but allowed him to live decorously with the ecclesiastical tithes paid by the inhabitants.