The Dawn of Coptic Studies in the Shadow of the "City of the Two Towers": Giovanni Luigi Mingarelli and Two Forgotten Noteworthy Coptological Achievements

In the last quarter of the 18th century, Bologna unexpectedly became one of the main centres of Coptic studies. The main purposes of this article are informing the scholarly community of the existence of an unpublished dictionary compiled by Giovanni Luigi Mingarelli while he was working on the manuscripts from the White Monastery, purchased by Giacomo Nani for his collection in Venice, and describing another equally neglected achievement of the Bolognese scholar that is the initiative to commission a set of Coptic characters in a city that lacked an editorial tradition in Oriental languages.