The project focuses on poetry and prose written by members of the Arcadia from 1690 to 1768. The texts are preserved in 17 manuscripts in the Arcadia's archive and in many editions of Rime, Carmina, Prose, Giuochi Olimpici, Adunanze published between 1701 and 1768. It is more than 10,000 pages, about 30,000 texts and several hundred authors. The Arcadia was founded not as an academy but as an independent state (a democratic republic) and was a place where multiple diversities coexisted, as disciplinary diversity, social diversity, geocultural diversity, linguistic diversity, gender diversity, diversity of cultural models. The project aims to produce research tools for studying a complex and multifaced entity as the Arcadia was, i.e. 1) digitization of the 13 mss. of Componimenti Arcadici and the 4 mss. of Atti Arcadici; 2) bio-bibliographic profiles of the authors of the Componimenti Arcadici; 3) critical editions of the texts preserved both in manuscript and printed versions; 4) translations of Latin and Greek texts into Italian; 5) a wider panorama of the models of the Arcadian poetry; 6) an atlas of the Arcadian culture, which focuses on the contribution given by the Arcadians to culture, politics and society of the last period of the ancien régime; 7) online publication of all the works of points 1-6.
The thesaurus of works and authors will be indexed by 7 key points: 1) peace, as opposed to war, 2) friendly coexistence, 3) diversity, 4) relationship between literature and visual arts, 5) man-nature relationship, 6) poverty (i.e. a middle-class lifestyle) vs richness and luxury, 7) the Arcadia as a society of intellectuals capable of exercising soft power on political power. The texts will finally be arranged in an atlas of the Arcadian culture, organized by the key points. The atlas will contain year by year all the texts or passages related to each key point; it will be possible to read the atlas by authors; each key point will have a number of subdivisions.
Despite the centuries-old bibliography and the growth of interest in the last decades, the basic tools for studying the world of the Arcadia, such as reproductions of manuscripts and critical editions, are still lacking. The digitization of a big corpus of manuscripts, the production of a bio-bibliographic repertoire of hundreds of authors, mainly still unknown, a vast program of critical editions (including 15th-century texts), and the translation of corpora of Latin and Greek poetry would represent a substantial progress not only in the studies on the Arcadia, but also in the wider panorama of studies on the last period of the ancien régime. A first survey of the manuscripts and a comparison with the printed editions has revealed about two hundred texts of different genres to be published (sonnets, canzoni, eclogues, odes, elegies, extracts of scientific and didactic poems, dithyrambs, apologues, epigrams). The research tools will be built and the sources will be edited and studied in a unitary hermeneutic framework, by scholars who have been working for years, from different perspectives, on the same objects. It will only be the first step in the research. The thesaurus of authors and text gathered from manuscripts and 18th-century editions will be organized by the researchers according to 7 key points that the bibliography on the Arcadia has not yet or only occasionally considered. 1) The theme of peace, as opposed to war; the Arcadia (and Rome) as bulwark of the values of peace and places consecrated to the culture of peace. 2) The theme of civil coexistence; the Arcadia as a model of society based on ethical and civil values that are opposed to the negative values that dominate in the cities, i.e. in political and economic centres. 3) The theme of diversity; the Arcadia as a "conventio ad includendum" that managed to hold together classes and people, which formerly had been completely separate. 4) The theme of the relationship between literature and the visual arts, not only in the context of the Concorso Clementino, but also within the Arcadia, where writers and artists interacted constantly. 5) The theme of the man-nature relationship and its multiple interpretations and changes during the long period under consideration. 6) The theme of poverty (i.e. middle-class lifestyle) as sanity and moral integrity vs richness and luxury as physical and moral degeneration. 7) The Arcadia as a society of poets, artists, and scholars capable of exercising influence on political power. It must be considered that the power of the popes and their influence in Europe during the 18th century was relying less and less on political power, more and more on the ability to exercise a soft power that had one of its strengths in cultural prestige. The Arcadia, for its part, already exercised its own soft power on political power in papal Rome and in the other cultural centers in which the Arcadian colonies were settled. What contribution did the Arcadia make to this new image of papal power? How did the Arcadia interact with political power? What images did it draw, what merits did it claim, what ideas did it support in the panorama of 18th-century Italy?
Authors, texts, and time segments of the period under consideration will be investigated following the 7 key points; the outcome will be a thesaurus of texts selected from the above mentioned sources. A conference with external specialists from Italy and abroad will be organized not only to discuss the main issues raised by the thesaurus but also, and primarily, to investigate to what extent cultures different from the Arcadia and outside Italy were challenged by the key points or were influenced by the culture of the Arcadia. The conference will focus on the preparation of the atlas of the Arcadian culture. The atlas will be organized by the 7 key points and contain year by year all the texts or passages related to each key point; it will be possible to read the atlas by authors; each key point will have several subdivisions; for example, the key point ¿peace¿ will contain subdivisions as peace vs war in Italy, peace vs war in Europe, peace vs war in the Christian world, war against the Turks, religious peace / political peace, Rome as "caput pacis", the Arcadia as a country of peace and keeper of peace-related activities and virtues. The atlas will provide a new image of the Arcadia, based on the multiple interaction of different ideas, features, categories. Thus, the Arcadia will be fully inserted into the cultural, social and political environment in which it was born and on which it exerted a profound influence for decades. The research tools and the ideas brought into focus by the project will be useful not only for understanding 18th-century Italian culture, but also for studying early modern academies and for shedding new light on the relationship between literature and society in the last period of the ancien régime.