The goal
Giacomo Leopardi’s manuscripts are held in many libraries and archives, in Italy and abroad. Anyone studying them has to move from one catalogue to another to find the image, the description and the critical context. The Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani, together with the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, the Università di Macerata and ICCU, set out to bring them together in a single place and open them not only to specialists, but also to teachers, students and enthusiasts.
Our response
A single access point where each manuscript is presented with its high-resolution reproduction, its catalogue description and the editorial team’s commentary. A digital library built on Muruca, in which every piece of information points back to its source and to the institution that vouches for it. Four sections (Biblioteca, Opere, Percorsi, Ricerca avanzata) structure consultation, from philological research to classroom teaching.
An architecture for those who study, teach and read
The information architecture was shaped by distinct needs. The philologist searches by library, collection and shelfmark, filters by available digital resources and zooms into the leaf down to the watermark; the teacher finds ready-made thematic itineraries in the Percorsi section, complete with manuscripts, transcriptions and critical context; the enthusiast leafs through the facsimile of L’Infinito and follows its corrections and variants. Every result immediately shows title, library and content; access is free, with no registration, from any device. The design combines editorial tradition with a contemporary interface: the petrol blue of the navigation sits alongside ivory and sand tones that recall the paper of the manuscripts, completed by ochre accents. Serif headings evoke the literary world; sans-serif body text supports consultation. The homepage features a stylised illustration of Leopardi; on inner pages, neutral backgrounds and generous spacing leave the documents centre stage.
ICCU as the primary source, Muruca as the editorial space
The work began with the census: the project’s scientific leads deposited the metadata in Manus Online, ICCU’s manuscript catalogue, and the platform reads it through the APIs the institute exposes. A national catalogue is necessarily generic, and therefore rigid; Muruca, Net7’s open-source framework for Digital Humanities, makes it possible to enrich each imported record with an editorial layer: sender, recipient, place and date for letters, incipit for untitled documents, categories grouping related manuscripts. Data is not imported once and for all: an aligned backup and on-demand updates prevent outdated information and keep ICCU as the primary source. Images are delivered from the partners’ IIIF servers; the texts of the works are encoded in XML-TEI, downloadable and linked to international authority files.
