L’edizione digitale dell’“Esordio” di Storia d’Italia di Francesco Guicciardini
10.6092/issn.2532-8816/14807
Recensione del nuovo prototipo dell’edizione digitale dell’“Esordio” della Storia d’Italia di Francesco Guicciardini.
[https://guicciardini-storia-italia.huma-num.fr/storia-it.html]
 
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The digital edition of the «Esordio» of Storia d’Italia by Francesco Guicciardini
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The digital edition of the «Esordio» of Storia d’Italia by Francesco Guicciardini
https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/article/view/14807/14754
    Umanistica Digitale – ISSN: 2532-8816 – n. 13, 2022
I. Burattini – Review: e digital edition of the «Esordio» of the Storia d’Italia by Francesco
Guicciardini
DOI: http://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/14807



   Review: e digital edition of the «Esordio» of the Storia
            d’Italia by Francesco Guicciardini

                                         Ilaria Burattini

                               Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italia
                                ilariaburattini04@gmail.com




       1. Digital Humanities and the text in itinere

Nowadays several projects of digital critical editions are being developed. In this regard, a
volume recently appeared on Griseldaonline – an 'Alma Mater' University of Bologna online
magazine – entitled Italianistica Digitale, has collected essays dedicated to digital studies
applied to humanistic methods and knowledge ([5]). On this occasion, many projects were
presented, in addition to some that have already been active and that have acted as models for
this constantly innovating discipline. Among other works are Leopardi Ecdosys, focused on
Leopardi’s Idylls; Philoeditor, experimented on the two printed editions of Promessi Sposi and
Collodi’s Pinocchio; or again, outside the national borders, the Spanish project, carried out in
collaboration with the University of Bologna, on the Lope de La Vega’s La Dama Boba, or the
English prototype of Proust’s notebooks (Cahier 46), developed by Julie André and Elena
Pierazzo, which can be regarded «as a ﬁrst step to a future digital edition of Proust’s
manuscripts» ([1]: 53). All these initiatives were already presented at a conference organised in
2015 by 'Sapienza' University of Rome, whose proceedings have been collected in a volume
edited by Claudia Bonsi and Paola Italia ([3]). Returning to the Italian parterre, as for the
projects, the bibliography on the subjects has grown increasingly in the past few years, aiming
at discussing and reﬂecting on new design models as well as problems relating to the
implementation and standardisation of such initiatives. Among these bibliographical
contributions we can recall the studies of Tiziana Mancinelli and Elena Pierazzo ([11]);
Francesco Stella ([17]); Paola Italia e Francesca Tomasi ([8];[9]).

e usefulness of these digital supports, even when transposed to the humanities, has long been
clear. rough open source systems and the aims of interoperability, ﬂuidity, dynamism and
iconicity, the new digital platforms allow us to interactively visualise the history of a text,

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deepening the process of its genesis ([6]). erefore, these systems, in spite of the variety of the
encoding methods used depending on the nature of the text itself, make it possible to overcome
the limits of a linear and static visualisation, usually compressed in the limited space of a paper
page. On the contrary, the digital version returns the value of the text not as a ﬁnished product,
but as a dynamic text that can be visualised at each stage of its evolution, within its own
history. Such hypertextual editions thus oﬀer the chance to visually and iconically represent the
diﬀerent movements of the text over time, also thanks to the use of «policromia» and
«spazialità» ([10]: 15), and to compare them with each other. In this way, it is possible to
deﬁne not only the quantity but also, and above all, the quality of the author’s variants and to
understand the reasons for their revision and evolution, in a perfect and hoped-for synthesis
between philology and criticism.

Despite the fact that many digital editions have followed one another in a short time, there is a
lack of common paradigms and unambiguous guidelines. is gap has often precluded – and
still precludes – a dialogue between the various projects, which appear as a sort of isolated
monads that the reader may come across by pure chance. What has just been said is particularly
true for most of the digital Italian attempts, characterised by «frammentazione», «dispersione»
and digital «isolamento» ([8]:79). On the other hand, a standardisation capable of bringing
together diﬀerent philological-digital initiatives within a shared system does not exclude the
need to preserve the speciﬁcity of each text, without distorting or simplifying its textual nature,
even, and above all, in cases of rather complex genetic history, as the work by Beatrice Nava on
Alessandro Manzoni’s Conte di Carmagnola has demonstrated ([15]).



       2. Relationships between complex genetic histories and Digital
       Humanities: the case of Francesco Guicciardini

When speaking of complex ecdotic history, we cannot fail to mention the extraordinary case of
Francesco Guicciardini. e Florentine author, even though he never claimed to be a
humanist, reserved a maniacal care for his texts, bending them to an indefatigable exercise of
writing and re-writing. In fact, most of his known works have been written in several stages,
aimed at perfecting the formal stylistic structure in order to achieve a prose that is as clear and
lucid as it is coherently and logically ordered. We only need to recall the diﬀerent drafts of
Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze, of Oratio Accusatoria or Ricordi. Even more exceptional and
singular in its complexity, which is also the cause of its profound charm, is the case of Storia
d’Italia, the masterpiece whose prolonged elaboration accompanied Guicciardini until his death
in 1540. It has been preserved in various manuscripts, partly in the family archives and partly
in the Biblioteca Laurenziana, both in Florence. By now, there is only one critical edition of
the work, edited by Alessandro Gherardi and Enrico Rostagno in the ﬁrst half of the 20th


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                                                                                        Guicciardini



century ([7]). Over the years, further discoveries have followed one another, making it
necessary, however, to update this critical work that remains, even today, a milestone in
Guicciardini’s critical and philological studies.

Certainly, the diﬃculty of reconstructing Guicciardini’s work on the text of the Storia and
restoring it in the space of a paper critical edition was clear then and is much clearer today: it is
in fact a matter of dealing with a rather large number of witnesses, continuously and densely
compelled by the hand of the author or by his secretaries, in a crossroad where authorial
philology and philology of the copy merge. Not to mention the background – the «avantesto» –
that precedes and accompanies the drafting of the work, including correspondence, notes and
memos – the so-called Memorie Storiche – and other texts that, left unﬁnished, ended up
ﬂowing into the basin of the Storia.

Given the philological complexity of Guicciardini’s case, how can a new critical edition be
built? And, above all, how to construct a critical edition that makes clear to its public the
intricate editing process that included, after revision, a large amount of preparatory material?
Paola Moreno in her book Come lavorava Guicciardini oﬀers two diﬀerent examples of the
critical edition of the Storia d’Italia’s Esordio. In summary, Moreno presents two diﬀerent
possibilities of edition: the ﬁrst refers to just one of the manuscripts that have transmitted the
text and to a textual segment of a few lines; the second one includes the entire text of the
Esordio and it accounts for each passage that has characterised the diﬀerent drafts, from the ﬁrst
manuscript to the last ‒ the manuscript Laurenziano, which is the basis of the modern printed
editions ([13]). is “analogical” attempt is counterbalanced by a new digital prototype,
designed by an international team headed by Moreno herself, who proposes to oﬀer the critical
edition, this time in a digital version, of the Storia d'Italia's Esordio ([12]). is prototype    ‒
available in French and in Italian ‒ presents an edition of the diﬀerent drafts of the Esordio.
e text, although not so extensive, was the result of a tormented work of composition, which
lasted ﬁve years and is today testiﬁed by eight manuscripts, within which it is possible to
identify multiple internal re-writings ([2];[12]).



       3. e digital edition of the «Esordio» of the Storia d’Italia: building
       a prototype

anks to a user-friendly system the site is easy to consult, with a ‘speaking’ interface allowing
the user to ﬁnd his way around. Divided into macro-sections, the main index          ‒ placed on a
horizontal bar   ‒ oﬀers several headings to select: if we exclude the ﬁrst one, Progetto (Project),


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the other headings correspond to a speciﬁc display of the text: Manoscritti (Manuscripts),
Segmenti Testuali (Textual Segments), Edizioni (Editions). In more detail, the ﬁrst section,
Progetto, is an eﬃcient guide for the user: it contains various kinds of information, divided into
paragraphs by clicking on the selectors on the left of the page. In addition to a description of
the project and of the technologies used, this ﬁrst page, just like a “Note to the text”, contains a
list of manuscripts that have been handed down the Esordio from the beginning. Furthermore,
this section oﬀers notes on method or on lexicon, useful for a better orientation within the
composing dynamics of the Esordio.

By moving the cursor to the Manoscritti section, it is possible to choose one of the various
drafts of the text using a drop-down selector, which can be displayed in two diﬀerent ways:

    1.   Riproduzione fotograﬁca (Photographic reproduction), a facsimile of the manuscript,
         interesting for understanding how the author has materially organised his work page.
    2.   Trascrizione diplomatica-interpretativa (Diplomatic-interpretative transcription), where
         the page, as in a photograph, is reproduced in an iconic manner, showing the
         topography of the corrections, which can be made by superscription, by formatting or
         by insertion in line spacing and in the margin. It has also chosen to mark in red with
         an arrow of the same colour those annotations added in the margin by the author,
         marked and ordered inside the text in alphabetical order (A, B, C, etc.); whereas the
         parts left open or deleted are coloured in grey.
ese transcriptions can then be displayed according to two other textual reconstructions: one
version called Primo getto (First draft), where it is possible to read   ‒ in relation to the chosen
textual phase ‒ the text in its ﬁrst draft, prior to revision; a second version called instead Testo
revisionato (Revised text), which displays the ﬁnal state of the text. In this way, the multiple
layers of the text can be more easily visualised.
Furthermore, by using a selector, located on the top right-hand corner, the reader can choose
diﬀerent combinations of side-by-side visualisation: it is possible to compare in a synoptic way
the image ‒ the facsimile of the manuscript ‒ of a speciﬁc drafting phase with the
corresponding text in one of the proposed types of visualisation (Diplomatic-interpretative
transcription; First draft; Revised text); or to choose a purely textual comparison, where
diﬀerent types of visualisation of a text attributable to the same drafting phase are compared.
Also in this case, the exploration is intuitive: indeed, after choosing the diﬀerent possibilities
for displaying and comparing the text(s), the user may also choose which page to display (recto
or verso) thanks to other selectors.
Next, there is the heading Segmenti di testo (Textual segments), where a parallel reading of the
several drafts of the same textual fragment is proposed. It is possible to visualise the section of
the text in the two stages of writing   ‒ either the ﬁrst draft or the revised text. e reading can

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                                                                                        Guicciardini



be further ﬁltered through selectors on the left of the page, thanks to which it is possible to
select manuscripts, segments or drafting stages.

In the last entry, Edizioni (Editions) each individual draft can be read in the ﬁrst or revised text
version. It is possible, also in this case, to compare diﬀerent versions of the text, using the
selectors in the left-hand margin.

is kind of prototype allows the user to easily follow the genetic history of the text. Going
into more technical details, which are explained in the initial section (Progetto), the text has
been marked-up with the XML-TEI language, using three diﬀerent markers, i.e. three displays
for a single encoding operation. For the section Manoscritti, the EVT 1.1 display system was
used, which is very popular among practitioners due to its highly intuitive interface. e
challenge of Guicciardini’s case, however, forced the designers of the project to add further
elements and attributes that would allow the evolution of the text to be fully represented. In
fact, the original EVT scripts did not provide the transformation with many of the elements
and element attributes needed for corpus coding, such as substitutions, various types of
deletions (of rend="overstrike" or rend="underline") or additions in various positions (in the
line spacing, left margin, top or bottom). To this purpose, other scripts were created, both in
EVT’s xslt and in the CSS. e software was then modiﬁed to obtain three diﬀerent output
formats, adding an additional version for the semi-diplomatic text and then adapting the two
existing formats for the other two text versions. In this way, there are three sets of scripts linked
with a hundred CSS styles created ad hoc and deﬁned by a cascading style sheet. Finally, Python
and XLST were used for the creation of Segmenti Testuali section.

A prototype of digital edition organised in this way restores, like a paper edition, the
consubstantiality between authorial philology, representing how a text evolves over time, and
hermeneutics, identifying the fulcrums of the author’s thought that has undertaken an
authentic hand-to-hand struggle with his papers. e hope is that, by continuing this successful
digital experimentation, Guicciardini’s masterpiece may be enriched, alongside these initial
pages of the Esordio. In fact, we are dealing with papers and manuscripts that have interacted
closely with a variety of written production during the course of their drafting: the long
gestation of the text, which went hand in hand with the continuous ﬁne-tuning of his work
method, aimed at ﬁnding every documentary source. Furthermore, with stylistic labor limae,
we have seen epistolary excerpts and passages of other works ﬂowing into the basin of the
Storia ([14]), as happened with the Commentari della luogotenenza ([16]). It would then be
interesting, even just for portions of text, to catalogue the types of variants    ‒ substantial or
formal ‒ that occur between one version of the text and another, by using typographic
markers. In this way it would be possible to visually retrace the evolutionary phases of the text
and underline the quality and peculiarity of Guicciardini’s intervention. erefore,

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understanding the process that led to the ﬁnal text means to understand more deeply the
purpose of this massive rewriting campaign. A work of this sort would clarify not only the
method used by the author in the drafting of his masterpiece but would also allow a general
understanding of Guicciardini’s complex ‘writing system’.

At this point, it is easy to understand the incidence of the digital medium, which, much more
than a printed edition, allows to visualise the evolutionary process of Guicciardini’s work in an
immediate and intuitive way, thus oﬀering a privileged key to access to his writing laboratory.
Initiatives, such as this one dedicated to Guicciardini, which has been able to provide an essay
on the systematic and analytical edition of a text with a complex and troubled history, force us
to reﬂect on the «funzione transformativa» ([11]:9) induced by the digital, both on the method
of edition and on the way it is used by its public.

Finally, such philological case experimented in digital form oﬀers incentives and challenges
how to think or rethink the traditional way to represent complex textual traditions. is applies
consequently to critical edition in its canonical version, i.e. on paper, but also in its hypertext
and interactive version. Freeing itself from the limitations of a linear representation, from a
reliable critical text the digital editions allow us to restore the ﬂuid entity of a text in itinere, in
its dynamic approach to its «valore» ([4]:241) and to represent the correction process. In this
way, it is possible to reconstruct at each stage the mobility and the dynamism of the text itself,
which are the two main purposes of philology and, especially, of authorial philology.



       References

     [1] André, Julie. 2016. “Proust’s Writing: First Drafts of a Digital Representation”. In
         Digital Critical Editions. Comparing Editions, edited by Paola Italia and Claudia
         Bonsi,         53-62.       Rome:         Università       Sapienza         Editrice.
         https://doi.org/10.13133/9788893770033
     [2] Bramanti, Vanni. 2008. “Il tormentato incipit della Storia d’Italia”. «Schede
         Umanistiche», XXII: 123-156.
     [3] Bonsi, Claudia and Italia, Paola, ed. 2016. Digital Critical Editions. Comparing
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     [5] Dello Buono, Martina and Giovannetti, Francesca, ed. 2021. Italianistica Digitale.
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                                                                                   Guicciardini



[6] Driscoll, Matthew and Pierazzo, Elena, ed. 2016. Digital Scholarly Editing. eories
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[11] Mancinelli, Tiziana and Pierazzo, Elena, ed. 2020. Che cos’è un’edizione scientiﬁca
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[13] Moreno, Paola. 2020. Come lavorava Guicciardini. Rome: Carocci editore.
[14] Moreno, Paola. “Il carteggio guicciardiniano, fabbrica della Storia d’Italia”, in La
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[15] Nava, Beatrice. 2018. “Edizione digitale di opere a tradizione complessa: il caso del
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[17] Stella, Francesco. 2018.Testi letterari e analisi digitale. Roma: Carocci.




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