Ricerc@Sapienza

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.