High-resolution images, catalogue descriptions and editorial commentary in one place: the platform that brings the poet’s papers together was presented in Recanati.
There are two autograph manuscripts of L’Infinito. One is held at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, the other at the Archivio storico municipale in Visso. The Naples manuscript records the correction of a single line: “celeste confine” (heavenly boundary) struck through, with “ultimo orizzonte” (furthest horizon) written in its place. Until now, comparing the two sheets meant moving from one institution to another, and from one catalogue to the next. The same was true of Leopardi’s manuscripts as a whole, scattered across many libraries and archives in Italy and abroad.
On Friday 25 September, in the Sala Franco Foschi of the Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani in Recanati, the Biblioteca Digitale Leopardiana was presented: a single access point for those papers. Held under the patronage of the Italian Ministry of Culture, the event took place on the eve of the Centre’s 90th anniversary. After welcome addresses from the Mayor of Recanati, Emanuele Pepa, CNSL President Fabio Corvatta, Countess Olimpia Leopardi and Alessandra Troilo for FAI – Orto sul Colle dell’Infinito, the floor passed to the scholars who built the project: Simonetta Buttò, former director of ICCU; Silvia Scipioni and Fabiana Cacciapuoti of the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli; Laura Melosi and Gioele Marozzi of the Università di Macerata; and Chiara Aiola, Project Manager and Software Engineer at Net7.
Promoted by the Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani with the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, the Università di Macerata and ICCU, the project is the outcome of an inter-institutional effort that began in 2016. The scientific leads catalogued the manuscripts and deposited their metadata in Manus Online, ICCU’s manuscript catalogue. It’s a complete resource, but a hard one to navigate if you’re looking for a single document, its image and its critical context.
Net7 designed and developed the platform on Muruca, its open-source framework for Digital Humanities. One principle guided the architecture: ICCU remains the primary source of the data. The platform reads metadata from Manus Online through APIs and keeps it aligned with on-demand updates, rather than importing it once and for all. On top of that, it adds an editorial layer: sender and recipient for letters, incipits for untitled documents, categories that group related manuscripts. High-resolution images are delivered from the IIIF servers of the libraries that hold the originals; the texts of the works are encoded in XML-TEI and linked to international authority files.
The result is a tool built for different audiences. Philologists search by library, collection and shelfmark, and zoom into a leaf down to the watermark. Teachers find ready-made thematic itineraries in the Percorsi section – such as Donne e femminile in Leopardi (Women and the feminine in Leopardi) – with manuscripts, transcriptions and critical context ready for the classroom. Readers who love Leopardi can open both autographs of L’Infinito and follow, on the page itself, the shift from “celeste confine” to “ultimo orizzonte”. Access is free, with no registration, from any device.
Explore the Biblioteca Digitale Leopardiana at leopardi.it.
