The first librarian

Fausto Pagliari was born into a wealthy family in Cremona on 3 November 1877. He had inherited from his father the ideals of the Risorgimento of equality and social justice which would lead him to sympathize with socialism. After attending the local school of commerce, in 1899 he obtained a diploma in Economics, Statistics and Law at the Royal Higher School of Commerce in Venice and subsequently, while attending a higher education institution in Vienna, he obtained two teaching qualifications, one in Political Economy, Public Finance and Statistics (1900) and the other in German Studies (1902). Giovanni Montemartini, a friend of his father, called him to Umanitaria – a philanthropic entity organizing classes for uneducated workers – and assigned him to the labor office, with the task of directing a practical school of social legislation in which he held several courses and lectures. These were then collected in a volume entitled “Working-class organization in Europe”, which to this day represents a milestone in the history of labor unionism. 

In the meantime, he had approached socialist leader Filippo Turati and began to collaborate with the magazine “Critica sociale” which the latter edited, soon becoming, according to the words of the Milanese socialist, “an exceptional reporter, who, without moving from his desk, with the help of books and journals, which hold no secrets for him, blazed suggestive paths in the world of labor, by providing in-depth reports, sagaciously commented documentaries, vast panoramas and close-up portraits which opened new horizons to the nascent proletarian and socialist movement.” The habit of operating ever more effectively on secondary sources would be extremely useful to him when in 1924 the fascist regime decided to suppress the voice of the Umanitaria by firing its directors. At the suggestion of antifascist intellectual Carlo Rosselli, then Assistant Professor of Economics at the University, and the famous economist Piero Sraffa, Rector Angelo Sraffa (and Piero’s father) decided to hire Pagliari at Bocconi. He was given the task of enhancing its library, which until then had been managed in a rather disordered manner, so as to make it an institution worthy of the role that Bocconi was playing in Milan and aroung the country.  

Thus in February 1925 Pagliari began his work to transform the University Library, where he would find an environment congenial to his temperament that led him to see and judge everything through the printed word, as well as "a refuge favorable to his beloved studies and vocation as an instructor." He would remain at Bocconi for forty years becoming “the Librarian” and a trusted reference for students, junior faculty and professors at the University.