«Lo spaccato della noce». Infanzia epistolare di Gianfranco Contini apprendista (1925-1933)

This essay aims to outline Gianfranco Contini’s birth as an epistolographer. It focuses on his earliest letter to the French botanist Gaston Bonnier (1925) and analyses his twenty-year-old epistolary attitude (1933) in order to build a paradigm of Contini as a letter writer who is primarily a reader and a conversationalist, but is, in addition, a hermit/traveller, a lover and a wandering knight. Although Contini frequently states that the real epistolographer is one in his twenties, this essay argues that the fluency and grace of the letter writer does not diminish with time, and that his calling as an epistolographer lasts until his last years as an answer to his need for expressive and human “polygamy”. For Contini, the letter is the exclusive domain where the contemporary critic and the professional philologist can not only coexist, but through mutual interaction become more prominent thanks to the power of the human voice.