A volume of studies dedicated to a friend and colleague as he or she is about to retire is not only an affectionate tribute and a testimony of esteem and consideration for what he or she has done, it also serves to exorcise the time that has inexorably passed, to delude oneself that one who does intellectual work can always continue to do it regardless of age limits. This is true if you retain your initial spirit, interest and strength, if these continue to sustain you and have not waned.

This monograph continues only in part - in the last chapters - the one on Apostolic Legation with which, at only twenty-four years of age, Catalano had brilliantly debuted on the scholarly level, demonstrating his historical interests that anticipated the legal ones (religious freedom, the problem of concordats, Art. 7 of the Constitution, etc.) that followed shortly afterwards. These were studies to which Catalano would remain bound for the rest of his life (Legazia was reprinted in 1973, together with an article on its origins - 1088-1178 ) and that he would continue to cultivate.

The 1954-55 volume was published in the Proceedings of the Accademia di Scienze Lettere ed Arti in Palermo, the city where Catalano, after a brief period in Catania, was to begin his teaching, first as a lecturer in Exegesis of the Sources of Italian Law and then as a full professor of ecclesiastical law for over thirty years, before concluding his career at the Sapienza University in Rome. In Palermo, Prof. Camillo Giardina, whose disciple Catalano had been in Messina, had wanted him, who had also been the intermediary for this publication, since the Studies published by the Academy had to be presented by a Member.

Catalano had greatly expanded his research by travelling to Spain to consult the General Archives of Simancas, the National Historical Archives and the fonds of the National Library in Madrid, as well as those of the Messina and Palermo libraries and the Vatican Archives, for which he felt they deserved even greater consideration than the Apostolic Legation, published in the Catania Law Faculty Series. This was not the case for several reasons. On the one hand, the study had had little circulation, since it was difficult to find the Acts of an Academy of Homeland History, such as that of Palermo, which was mainly concerned with the history of Sicily; secondly, the work was full of typographical errors to the point that it was necessary to add a long list of errata-corriges; but above all because it seemed that Catalano only wanted to continue his studies on the Legazia, which could be considered well defined despite having dealt with the latest events and, in particular, the Liparitan controversy.

Catalano cared little about this. He believed that the life and fortune of a book was independent of the place and type of edition; that typographical errors, which could not be disputed, could be corrected in a second edition; and that what he had done, both for the further research he had done and for the diversity of the subject matter - since the latter concerned jurisdictional disputes between Philip II and Gregory XIII also in the Italian domains of the Spanish king other than Sicily such as Milan and Naples - deserved different attention. He was certainly right on a scholarly level, as is proven by the very fact that one of his youngest students, Fabio Vecchi, recently dealt with such disputes with reference to Portugal in a volume of over six hundred and fifty pages.

If there is one teaching of Catalano's that we students have treasured, it is that law - especially ecclesiastical law - is not a mere logical construction but draws its lifeblood from historical events. Verification is therefore twofold, normative and historical, and this makes erroneous assessment almost impossible because what is not convincing on the legal level cannot be confirmed on the historical level, and what is not understood on the historical level cannot be justified on the legal level.

This was not the only teaching of Catalano, who looked at everything with a detachment - certainly historical - that allowed him a more equitable judgement. Catalano has always been understood more by historians than by jurists, even though he was capable of very fine analyses in this field, which, however, were perhaps of less interest to him because he considered them to be the fruit only of logical capacities that were not always close to reality.

I will add nothing more to what can be gleaned from Catalano's own introduction or from a historiographical analysis, not least so as not to deprive those who wish to read the work of the taste for discovery, as he would have wished. Although not a liberal, Catalano was a free man in his judgements and in his life, wanting nothing for himself. And it is this abstractness and detachment, which I have never found again, that I miss about him.