1.2.7

Italian traditions

The history of genetic criticism in the Italian tradition starts with Humanism, and from Francesco Petrarch’s “Codice degli Abbozzi” (fourteenth century). This chapter traces the framework of this tradition, highlighting how, with the simple but revolutionary gesture of leaving even the ugliest copies of his own masterpieces – the so-called “scartafacci” – to posterity, Petrarch created a model of an intellectual, a champion of classicism, the “style to be imitated”. Petrarch’s model left a trace of the toil of writing, the labor limae, which is considered the secret of style. From Machiavelli to Guicciardini, from Ariosto to Tasso, the “authorial function” has delivered a model of conservation and philology. After the triumph of the “scartafacci”, two exemplary nineteenth-century cases (Manzoni and Leopardi) will be discussed, as well as the twentieth-century text production, in which the study of manuscripts, tormented by countless revisions, reveals a possible “grammar of corrections” and is flanked by crucial problems of authorship.