Da Petrarca a Fracassetti: i Rerum memorandarum libri in una traduzione inedita

Still little has been said about the translation of the Latin treatise Rerum memorandarum libri by Francesco Petrarca, carried out by Giuseppe Fracassetti (1802-1883) in 1860 and remained incomplete and unpublished. Giuseppe Fracassetti was a lawyer, a historian, and a scholar from Fermo who published and translated, indeed, most Latin works of Petrarch — like a treatise entitled Della propria ed altrui ignoranza in 1858, the Latin Letters of Petrarch Familiari, (first in Latin edited in 1859-1863 and after in an Italian translation in 1863- 1867) and Senili (published in 1869-1870, only in Italian) – but he didn’t published his work about Rerum Memorandum Libri, his Libri delle cose memorabili. Fracassetti's editions about Petrarch are part of a cultural, political, and linguistic context of profound change, in which translations of the classics had a civil, as well as literary, value: starting from the reconstruction of the editorial process, circulation, and fortune of the published works, this thesis therefore proposes an in-depth review of Fracassetti’s autograph manuscripts kept in the homonymous archive of the “Spezioli” library of Fermo, documenting the translation. It also initiates a systematic investigation of the Latin sources used – and not declared – by the translator, starting with a comparison between the Latin marginalia he noted in the manuscript. This work intends to reveal this unpublished and incomplete translation (the work stops in fact at the third book) by accompanying it with a double-band apparatus to record the corrective stratigraphy of the papers and the author's annotations on the text (such as classical sources and doubts about the translation) with a focus also on the language used by Fracassetti, in keeping with the Italian prose of the time.