I achieved this by means of the Filosofo Home-Page Control plugin. However, for it to work I had to deactivate another plugin, WordPress Cannonical URL, because using both of them together exceeded the limit of address re-writes. After successful instalation, two details must still be taken care of:

  1. Put a link in the static home page to the blog page (this is the /Blog/ directory created as a Permalink). Otherwise, it is not clear to the user how to get to what would be the index.php page in a default installation: that’s the page that shows all the latest public postings, regardless of category.
  2. If using a page template for the static home page, then suitably modify page.php under the theme being used. In this way, if, for example, the description of a category should change, say, then it will not be necessary to make changes twice (in the category table and in the static home page). By using a page template, the home page will update itself and pull the content straight out of the database table.