AEVUM - 2013 - 3

Published in 1446, Biondo Flavio’s Roma instaurata is regarded as the first modern treatise on the topography of ancient Rome. In the context of the ongoing Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Biondo Flavio, a check-list of the 51 manuscript witnesses of Biondo’s work, with a succinct description of each item and its most relevant bibliography, is offered. This new recensio updates and corrects the former check-lists published by the Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo and by Anne Raffarin-Dupuis in her recent edition of Biondo’s treatise.

Guarino da Verona, one of the most important humanist teachers, translated various Greek authors and commented on numerous Latin classics. While it has long been acknowledged that Guarino’s exegetical method can best be gathered from his students’ lecture notes or recollectae, little attention has been paid to these mostly unpublished documents. This article offers a preliminary study and partial critical edition of recollectae on the popular school author Valerius Maximus that are transmitted in two manuscripts and are attributed to Guarino in one of these witnesses. A comparison with the recollectae published under the name of another famous Quattrocento teacher, Ognibene Bonisoli da Lonigo, illustrates that even if not very original, Guarino’s commentary was certainly typical of the genre in the fifteenth century.

Two important manuscripts commissioned by Ludovico il Moro for his son Massimiliano Sforza, the so-called Grammatica del Donato and the Liber Iesus (Milano, Archivio Storico Civico e Biblioteca Trivulziana, Triv. 2167 and 2163), were written by Giovanni Battista Lorenzi, a scribe operating in Milan between the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century. Other manuscripts are attributed here to Lorenzi for the first time, shedding new light on his versatile activities. He copied a number of manuscripts for the Arluno and the Tolentino families, mostly encomiastic works, medical and historical treatises composed by members of these patrician families (Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, D 34 bis inf., O 133 sup., S.P. II 25, S.P. II 254; Milano, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Morbio 21). Lorenzi also wrote or transcribed notarial deeds, including a legal document concerning the inheritance of Vitaliano Borromeo, here newly attributed to his hand (Milano, Archivio Storico Civico e Biblioteca
Trivulziana, Fondo Morando Litta Visconti Arese, cart. 7 / 1. c. III).

The Capuan nobleman and humanist Lelio Gentile ({1526) inherited and restored an ancient villa built on the ruins of the Roman Capitolium, in the core of the ancient Capua. According to the text of an inscription composed by Lelio himself and preserved by later antiquarian sources, he dedicated his villa to the Muses, Apollo and the Genius, and aimed to use it as a meeting place for humanists and poets, following the model of such illustrious predecessors as Alfonso of Calabria, Iacopo Sannazaro, and so forth. Lelio was also in contact with the intellectual milieu of the royal court of Naples, as it is witnessed by his friendship with Benet
Gareth, also known as Chariteo, and with Cosimo Anisio. The former dedicated to Lelio an encomiastic sonnet, the latter a Latin poem, both of which are published here.

In 1508 Baldassar Castiglione and Cesare Gonzaga composed Tirsi, a bucolic poem consisting of 55 stanzas, where stanzas 40-45 celebrate the poets active at the court of Urbino, near the duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga. Four of these poets, each one introduced in a stanza, are identified by the quotation of a line from their works. The authors of two of the quoted poems are uncertain, altough these poems enjoyed a certain circulation in manuscripts and printed books. The attribution to Castiglione and Gonzaga is here suggested; besides, four texts, mostly transmitted with these poems and similar in style, are published and also attributed to Cesare Gonzaga. Pietro Bembo appears as a model and reference for this literary milieu.

From the late twenties to the early thirties of the 16th century Ludovico Beccadelli and Giovanni Della Casa lived in Padua, where they met a lively and varied environment, dominated by Pietro Bembo. The Fondo Beccadelli in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma offers hitherto unknown texts (letters and poems), which are here edited for the first time: according to these documents, a new outline of the human and intellectual relationships of the two young men of letters is provided. The important role played Bembo on their literary education, even before the publication of his Rime (1530), is made clearer.

Milanese Chronicles from the 16th century report a short stay of the Shroud in Milan: it was taken there by the Dukes of Savoy, who fled Turin after the invasion by French forces. The ostension of the Shroud took place outside the Sforza Castle, on the barbican facing the town, in front of a multitude of people. Sources do not state who actually planned the ostension (probably Beatrice of Savoy). According to some historians, the initiative was promoted by a hermit close to St. Antonio Maria Zaccaria, but the assumption appears to be a misintepretation of a single source, suggested by the strong symbolic bond between the Shroud
and the so-called Eucharistic Quarantore (Forty Hours’ Adoration), a devotion originated in Milan in the same period.

The Baptistery of Castiglione Olona, built at the will of Cardinal Branda Castiglioni and frescoed by Masolino da Panicale in 1435 ca, has been used as the private chapel of the Castiglioni family for centuries. More than two hundred graffiti have been written on the walls from the 15th to the 20th century. They are manifold and include expressions of religious devotion, comments about the frescoed scenes (representing the life of St. John the Baptist), notes of local history. The most interesting graffiti are records of death, which include the dates of death (spanning over two centuries, from 1463 to 1693), the names of the dead and their titles.
The dead are mostly members of the Castiglioni family. A large number of graffiti are visitors’ signatures, datable from the 16th to the 20th century.

In 1630 a pamphlet with the title Due lettere l’una del Mascardi all’Achillini, l’altra dell’Achillini al Mascardi sopra le presenti calamità was published in Bologna; the two wellknown men of letters exchanged their opinions about the plague devastating Italy in that time and, in particular, on the possibility that the infection could be spread by evil human beings or devilish powers. Information are provided about the cultural background of the correspondence between Mascardi and Achillini, traditionally considered representatives of two opposite and conflicting literary tendencies: the first as an eminent exponent of the classicism of the Barberini’s circle, the other one close to Marino and to the more experimental line of the 17th-century poetry. Two centuries later Manzoni drew materials from this pamphlet for both I Promessi Sposi and La storia della colonna infame; new hypotheses are proposed on a possible interest of Manzoni in Mascardi’s most important work, the treatise Dell’arte istorica (Rome 1636), a
copy of which, with marks of reading, is preserved in the library of Casa Manzoni.

Quotations or echoes of the Bible, found in several works of Svevo, are listed and discussed in the present article: they may be divided in two sorts. In the first group of passages the biblical reference is clear or so evident as to imply the author’s will to make the source explicit; the second group includes texts where the reference is hidden or disguised in a wider contest that attenuates its recognizability.

The Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet preserves a collection of unpublished letters between the French poet André Frénaud (1903-1997) and outstanding 20th-century Italian poets, critics, essayists and publishers of the years from 1946 to the mid-eighties. After an introduction on Frénaud’s life and poetics, this essay outlines the circulation of his works in Italy. The letters of the collection are described, with an analysis of a number of them written by poets of the Milan area (Fortini, Vittorini, Montale, Sereni, Solmi, Erba, Risi): object ot the letters are friendly relationships, book exchanges and reviews, as well as shared publication projects, particularly intense during the fifties.

In the fall of 2013, at the Universita` Cattolica, Milan, a conference will be held to mark one hundred years since the birth of Giuseppe Billanovich. For the occasion, a bibliography of his writings and of writings on him is published here, in tribute to his memory.