The 19th-century manuscripts of one of Italy’s greatest poets and intellects, Giacomo Leopardi, will be transferred to Bologna after two big earthquakes wreaked havoc on the small central Italian town that houses the works, raising fears that they could be damaged.
The mayor of Bologna, Virginio Merola, announced that his city would take charge of the precious documents, including manuscripts of Leopardi’s poem L’Infinito, or The Infinite, as well as five sonnets and more than a dozen letters. The manuscripts have been kept in a museum in the Palazzo dei Governatori in Visso, a town that sustained substantial damage in the earthquakes on Wednesday.
“We shall now house them here in Bologna and provide all the support and solidarity which we as citizens should give,” Merola said.
There were no immediate indications of how long the manuscripts would be housed in Bologna. Officials in Visso could not be reached for comment and did not confirm the news in Italian press reports.
The move would represent something of a homecoming for the works, which were sold to the then-mayor of Visso in 1869 by the headmaster of the Galvani school in Bologna, who was under financial stress, for 400 lire.
Concerns about the safety of the works were first raised by the mayor of Bologna in August, following the huge earthquake that devastated the town of Amatrice, killing nearly 300 people in the area and causing some damage in Visso.
At the time, Luca Cristini, an expert in maintaining cultural heritage in the Marche region, advised the town of Visso to move the manuscripts to a safe place, preferably a bank vault.
Leopardi is not as well-known internationally as other famous European writers and thinkers of the 19th century, but critics have praised the poet’s work as rivaling that of Goethe. His prose, said critic Pietro Citati, was “no less unsettling that that of Nietzsche”.
One of the writer’s most famous works, Zibaldone, was not published until the turn of the 20th century, more than 60 years after Leopardi’s death at the age of 38. Parts of the work were not translated into English until 2013.
