After spending over 50 years in the Netherlands, Ben van Rijswijk discovered the Calabria and it was love at first sight. Husband of Angela Pitasi, originally from Reggio, he chose to live Condofuri, a city on the Ionian Sea and thanks to his passion for history he became a digital archivist.
A former teacher, Ben has chosen Calabria as his home
His story was told by lacnews24.it who interviewed Ben and made his extraordinary adventure known. It all started in the first years of his stay in Calabria, when Ben decides to go back to the ancestors of his wife. After some research he finds the parish registers of San Salvatore, Cardeto, Cataforio, Mosorrofa, Cannavò and San Lorenzo, managing to reconstruct documents up to 1590. "I became aware of the great existing but not usable heritage. I thought about doing something“, Declares Ben who has chosen Calabria for love and for an affinity with its places and climate that have allowed him to find and discover new rhythms and a new lifestyle.
«No abandoned place is ever just a mass of stones, old houses and ruins, as it lives and tells an ancient story», Explains Ben van Rijswijk, a history buff from an early age and a former chemistry and biology teacher in a town near Rotterdam. Already at that time his passion for genealogical research had led him to find documents from the 1200s to identify traces of his ancestors. Then the arrival in Calabria, the irresistible charm and the choice to stay here forever. A love so deep that Ben only returns once a year to Holland where his children Daniel and Elisa remain.
A people without history is a people without a future
Armed with a bicycle and a camera, Ben van Rijswijk he has explored and continues to explore the villages in search of documents and artifacts to archive. Thus was born the idea of offering his dedication to the community to take care of the digitization of the documentary heritage of the diocesan historical archive of Reggio Calabria - Bova, directed with foresight by Pia Mazzitelli. His work is also extended to the State Archives where he is photographing the notarial archives and has exceeded 100 thousand shots.
"A people without history is a people without a future. So I wanted to do something to preserve and save what is there. The documents, which are not of the state but of the people precisely, tell of an era, they preserve family stories that someone even far away, for example emigrated to another country or continent, might want to know that is why it is important to take photos and archive them online. There are also many particularly worn ancient documents which, in order to be preserved, must be able to be consulted digitally".
The work for the diocese of Reggio Calabria-Bova
For six years, Ben visited over one hundred parishes in the diocese of Reggio Calabria-Bova and snapped about 400 thousand photos. In this way he managed to give voices to centuries of history by also finding the registers of the deceased at the time of the plague of 1743. Among the many testimonies, one in particular struck his attention: "The dramatic story of Pietro Polacco, a Venetian nurse sent by the kingdom of Naples to help who, having violated the ban on entering the city closed due to the plague, was imprisoned and died in prison. I was also very impressed by the liber defuntorum written by the priest of the parish of Scilla after the 1908 tsunami. I paused to think of those people overwhelmed by that violent and sudden wave“, Said Ben van Rijswijk.
Ben's work does not stop only with the collection of documents but also with the preparation and publication of an index to create a digital archive of the diocese of Reggio Calabria - Bova. A work of extraordinary historical importance and all for an overwhelming passion.
