L'improvvisazione poetica nel Settecento italiano: un catalogo (1690-1800)

The research aims at retracing the role and importance of oral practices in learned italian culture of XVIII century, focusing on the phenomenon of improvised poetry. Being orality an unreachable dimension, this work is composed by a Catalogue made of different kind of traces, found in manuscripts and printed books, organized in individual sheets. We have counted 249 different subjects, whose biographies have been partially detected in order to determine their dates of birth and death, places of birth, social class (nobility, clergy of third state), gender, profession (if any), degree of nobility (if any), affiliation to religious orders (if any). Only witnesses related to subjects dead after 1690 (date of foundation of Accademia dell’Arcadia) have been taken into account, as well as those born before 1785 (otherwise, they should be considered XIX-century improvisers). The Introduction analyses the biographical data found, from a chronological (the distribution of improvisers during the century), geographical, and social perspective. We analyse also settings, forms, and themes of XVIII-century improvised poetry; places, structures and realization of the performances. A final paragraph is dedicated to new frontiers of research in this domain, taking place from this work. The Catalogue features two annexes, too : the first containing musical partitions for chanted performances ; the second, providing a metrical table of all 177 improvised lyrics found during the research.