L'EPISTOLARIO DI UGO FOSCOLO: CATALOGO

This thesis is undertaken within the framework of the research project Ugo Foscolo, Epistolario 1825-1827, which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (FNS ID 197859). The project is directed by Paolo Borsa at the University of Fribourg. Originally, the project aimed at describing the epistolary documents contained in volumes 36-47 of the Fondo Foscolo held by Biblioteca Labronica “Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi” in Leghorn. However, the project has expanded its scope beyond this initial goal. This expansion was prompted by factors such as the criteria used in the existing catalogue, identified gaps, and the discovery of over four hundred Foscolo autographs not included in the Edizione Nazionale. Consequently, the project evolved to encompass an updated catalogue of all known letters by Ugo Foscolo, necessitating missions to various institutions holding Foscolo's papers. The thesis is structured in two main parts. The first part consists of the catalogue of Foscolo's correspondence, which has been created and is hosted on DaSCH (Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities) and Epistulae (Université de Lausanne). The second part presents the research work and is divided into three chapters. The first chapter, titled Le carte foscoliane: storia e fondi (Foscolo's Papers: History and Collections), examines the fate of Foscolo's manuscripts in the period immediately following his death. It focuses on the processes of dispersal and attempts at reorganisation, with particular attention paid to the English papers. The second chapter explores the project of the Edizione Nazionale, presenting the history of the EN, its aims, and the contributions of key figures involved in its development, such as Plinio Carli. The third chapter, Gli epistolari e l’Epistolario (Epistolaries and the Epistolary), focuses on the realization of the catalogue. It examines the characteristics of Foscolo's correspondence in relation to other epistolary corpora, reviews various epistolary description projects, and presents the data model developed and used for describing Foscolo's letters. In conclusion, the present work has the objective to offer an organic reconstruction of the history of Foscolo's epistolary papers and to present their catalogue, which aims to describing the papers and the relationships between them in a form (that of structured data) that facilitates research. Furthermore, this work also aims to establish for those who study Foscolo's epistolary documents a single point of access for all data, information on the witnesses, links to resources in the catalogues of the holdings, and historical publications