LE RIME DI VITTORIO ALFIERI

This dissertation focuses on the Rime of Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803), aiming to enlighten, through a thematic, stylistic and philological commentary of the lyrical works in their entirety, the most significant aspects of the corpus, which counts more than 450 texts, composed during the poet's entire life and included for the most part in the two collections of Rime (1789) and Parte seconda (1799) prepared by the author himself. Although selections of Alfieri's poems have been repeatedly and effectively investigated from several perspectives, little has, however, been done to provide an encompassing commentary of the Rime, a lack which can be mainly ascribed to the problematical state of the critical edition, largely outdated by further discoveries of unknown poems after its first publication in 1933 and prepared by collating together only a few of the surviving manuscripts and the editiones principes. The chronological method of analysis, allowed by the constant presence in the autographs of date and time of composition for each poem, and the renewed study of the manuscripts and the first editions have resulted in the overcoming of the issues connected with the complex tradition and in the developing of a wide and detailed analysis of the whole lyrical production, which thus has been profitably read as a diary in verses, a lyrical autobiography formed by fragments written day by day before the Vita scritta da esso.