Critical Philology and Dante's Rime

10.3726/78000_91

Critical Philology and Dante’s Rime

Teodolinda Barolini Columbia University, New York

Abstract This essay examines the insufficient critical vigilance and transparency with which we monitor the porous boundaries between philology and interpretation, with special attention to the Due and Trecento. The claims of philologists are unfortunately not always truly philological, but rather are hermeneutic arguments masquerading as, and claiming the authority of, philological arguments: weak interpretation made illegitimately strong by being presented as philology. After looking at earlier examples of this non-critical practice (the acceptance as factual of E. H. Wilkins’ conjectural nine forms of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, the invention of a non-existent “original” ending of the Vita Nuova, the use of culturally-freighted nomenclature like “rime estravaganti”, the reification of a conjectural relation between Boccaccio’s canzoni distese and the unwritten books of the Convivio), I consider the recent “discovery” of a new Dantean text, the so-called “libro delle canzoni di Dante”, viewed as a moment when we can track the violation of the boundary between philology and hermeneutics in real time.

Keywords Dante, rime, canzoni distese, Vita Nuova, Convivio, critical philology

In the final pages of his memoir, Vittore Branca writes passionately of his dream of finding a Dantean autograph. He describes in detail the emotions that he feels at the thought of proximity to the handwriting of “the greatest poet of modern Europe”, feelings that include the intense desire to com- municate his discovery to the world:

Una commozione grande mi invade e insieme un’ansia di comunicarla agli altri. Penso subito di telefonare al «Corriere», di preparare un primo annuncio. Non avevo del resto, un ventennio prima, cominciato la mia collaborazione al giornale con una sug- gestiva scoperta dantesca? Un lungo trillo di campanello: è il segnale di chiusura se rale della Biblioteca. No, è la sveglia delle sette di mattina. I sogni all’alba, si sa, sono illusori (Branca, 1987, p. 199).1

1 As the editor of «Lettere Italiane», Vittore Branca published the study that is the direct forerunner of this one (Barolini, 2004). He did so despite his personal friendship with De Robertis. I would like to record here my profound gratitude for Branca’s commitment to open and vigorous intellectual debate, as well as my thanks to my dear friend Wayne Storey for our ongoing conversation about philological matters that has nourished me over many years.

The dream recounted at the end of Branca’s Ponte Santa Trinità is compelling because it is a feeling that we can all understand and that we have all, to some degree, experienced. And it is compelling also for its poignant and sobering recognition of limits: Branca registers the dream but also registers his acceptance of its illusory nature. This essay recounts the story of the recent “discovery” of a new Dante- an text, referred to by its discoverers as “il libro delle canzoni di Dante”. I explore this story as a case study of a phenomenon that I have been tracking since 1989, where I first noted it in the context of Petrarchan philology (Ba rolini, 1989; 2006; 2012, pp. 297–346): the phenomenon of our insufficient critical vigilance and transparency in monitoring the porous boundaries between philology and interpretation. These boundaries are necessarily porous, since interpretation and subjectivity are present in all forms of human cognition, nor am I suggesting that philologists be held to an impossible standard of inhabiting an interpretation-free zone. However, since philology lays claim to a more rigorously empirical and scientific foundation than that of literary interpretation, it is especially important that philologists be transparent about the discursive spectrum that they inhabit, and in particular that they signpost and acknowledge the point at which their arguments morph from philological arguments to interpretive ones. Along the path of my scholarly life, I found that I had to learn not to take on faith the statements of philologists. I learned that ecdotics must be scrutinized by hermeneutics, that philology must be accountable to philosophy. Although we tend to think that it is hermeneutics that must be certified by philology, in practical terms I have found myself, a literary critic, all too frequently in the position of verifying the claims of various philologists and finding them wanting, not because they were philologically incorrect, but because they were not philological. Rather, they were hermeneutic arguments masquerading as, and claiming the authority of, philological arguments. The framework that I have outlined above is the common denominator of the case studies I have looked at, including the one that is the focus of this essay. The case of the so-called “libro delle canzoni di Dante” is only special because it has happened in real time, before our eyes over the last decade, but otherwise it bears all the hallmarks of the previous cases I have considered. I will begin by listing the cases I have looked at previously, with only minimal documentation in order to make clear the common denominator: in each instance we find interpretive arguments used by philologists as though

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 91–114 Critical Philology and Dante’s Rime 93 they were philological arguments. Let me be explicit: philologists are of course permitted to engage in interpretation, and indeed are not capable of not engaging in interpretation (we will come to Domenico De Robertis’ principled attempt to refuse to engage in interpretation, as problematic as its converse). However, philologists have a responsibility – a moral responsibility, given that their work creates the textual foundation on which interpreters can build their interpretive castles – to be vigilant and transparent about labeling their interpretations and conjectures as such. As an installment in the ongoing practice of critical philology, this essay reflects my commitment to analyzing, in the context of the Italian Duecento and Trecento, the culturally inflected presuppositions that are built into supposedly objective philological discourses. There are numer- ous examples from the history of interpreting medieval Italian texts where the roles of philology and interpretation have been confused, to the det- riment of both endeavors. The following are examples of the egregious contamination between interpretation and philology, or better: they are examples of weak interpretation made illegitimately strong by being presented as philology. 1) The spreading as dogma of Ernest Hatch Wilkins’ doctrine of the nine forms of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, although the nine forms are non- existent and there are only two “extant” forms (Wilkins’ word). Wilkins himself frequently engages in speculation, which he presents as such.2 However Wilkins’ speculative hypotheses are frequently treated as factual by literary critics – and even by philologists, as in the case of Guglielmo Gorni’s 1978 essay on Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 142 (Gorni, 1978).3 Reading Wilkins’ The Making of the “Canzoniere” from the perspective of subsequent Petrarch criticism, one is startled by how many of Wilkins’ hypotheses are now treated as textual if not material facts (for full documentation, see Barolini, 2007).

2 For instance, Wilkins concludes his reasoning for choosing sestina 142 as the last poem of the form he labels the “pre-Chigi” or “Correggio” form of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta with a statement of probability: “I conclude, therefore, that it is probable that Part I of the Pre-Chigi form of the Canzoniere ended with No. 142” (Wilkins, 1951, p. 97). 3 Gorni accepts as factual Wilkins’ conjecture of sestina 142 as the last poem of the so-called – also conjectural – “Correggio form”.

2) The invention by Luigi Pietrobono (not a philologist, but his invention was later promoted by Maria Corti, who was) of a non-existent “original” ending of the Vita Nuova, which according to this theory was supplanted by our “current” ending, in order to explain away the incon- sistencies between Vita Nuova and Convivio. Pietrobono states transparently that he posits the existence of a lost original ending to the Vita Nuova in order to reconcile the Vita Nuova and Convivio, and therefore he in fact meets my standard. Both Michele Barbi and Mario Marti play exemplary roles in this story, as philologists who deplore Pietrobono’s hypothesis and try to bring philological reason back into the discussion. However, the absence of any reason – other than interpretive – to believe in a lost original ending of the Vita Nuova did not deter Maria Corti from reviving Pietrobono’s thesis, which she supports with argumentation that is entirely non-philological (see Barolini, 2014c). 3) The nomenclature adopted by philologists that assigns the term estra vaganti to the lyrics that Dante did not select for inclusion in the Vita Nuova and Convivio, as though this were a philologically neutral term, when instead it is freighted with value-based assumptions about the su- periority of the “organic” and the “ingathered” to the “fragmented” and the “ungathered”. These assumptions have governed the critical reflex- es of philologists, as we can see through analysis of the recurrent trope organico versus estravaganti in their writings. One example of the way that the pervasive trope warps critical judg- ment may be found in Michelangelo Picone’s 1995 essay Dante rimatore. Reviewing the issue of whether to include the Vita Nuova and Convivio poems within an edition of Dante’s lyrics, Picone first voices impeccable critical appreciation for the position of inclusion:

Ha così ragione Barbi nel ritenere essenzialmente diversa una lirica letta nel contesto della Vita nuova o del Convivio dalla stessa lirica letta invece singolarmente. Una rima accompagnata o meno dal commento dell’autore non viene insomma recepita nello stesso modo dal lettore. Come dimostrato da D. De Robertis, tale diversità trova talvolta dei riscontri anche al livello della lezione: una poesia può aver subito delle piccole ma significative variazioni testuali quando è passata dalla tradizione extravagante a quella organica della Vita nuova (Picone, 1995, p. 174)

Picone does not however conclude, with Barbi, that the poems later in- serted into the Vita Nuova and Convivio deserve their own space within

the lyric tradition. Instead, he pivots towards the position of exclusion, as practiced by Gianfranco Contini. Very interesting is the change of language that heralds Picone’s pivot, a shift to a lexicon that is freighted with cultural – rather than philological – baggage. Already signaled in his contrast between “la tradizione extravagante [sic]” and “quella organica della Vita nuova”, the value judgments that accrue to these supposedly objective categories – one “estravagante”, the other “organica” – jump out at us from the following sentence: “D’altro canto ha ragione anche Contini nel rispettare l’indipendenza e la specificità di opere come la Vita nuova e il Convivio; nel non ritenere cioè estra polabili le poesie ivi raccolte, e quindi nell’applicare un’ermeneutica del frammento solo alle Rime extravaganti [sic]” (Picone, 1995, p. 174). Here we are immersed in an anthropomorphic rhetoric whereby Contini “respected” the “independence” and identity of the Vita Nuo- va and Convivio. Respect was shown by keeping what was ingathered safely inside, by making sure that the lyrics once “raccolte” never again be plucked out, never again be considered “estrapolabili” and subjected to the “ermeneutica del frammento”. This rhetoric, constructed around the binary “inside” versus “outside”, raccolto/organico versus frammento/estravagante, is built into a philological discourse that has traditionally and suggestively referred to the poems not included by Dante in the “organic” Vita Nuova and Convivio as “rime estravaganti”. Pi- cone’s essay is only one of many examples that can be cited of the way in which this discourse conditions philological thought (Barolini, 2004; 2012, pp. 379–424). 4) The recent insistence that Cavalcanti’s Donna me prega was written as a response to the Vita Nuova, despite a complete lack of verifiable proof, and because this sequence of events creates a more dramatic story-line with respect to the cessation of friendship between Dante and his primo amico (Barolini, 2006, pp. 99–101; 2012, pp. 153–56). 5) The assignment of the majority of Dante’s canzoni (the same fifteen canzoni copied by Boccaccio and called by him, and hence by posterity, le canzoni distese) to non-existent books of Dante’s Convivio; and the resultant practice of non-critical or “wishful” philology, with respect to the way the Convivio would have been written had it been finished (again, such speculation is not illicit, but it should be labeled as such); 6) A newly hatched and more pernicious variant of the above: onto the legitimate claim that the organizational template known as the canzoni

distese was compiled in potentially diverse orders and states of com- pleteness prior to Boccaccio, in other words that Boccaccio inherited the anthology of fifteen canzoni from a prior scribe, is layered thepièce de résistance of conjectural or wishful philology – that the compiler is none other than Dante himself. The issues outlined in points 5 and 6 above will be the focus of this essay. I will begin by outlining the relevant features with respect to Boccaccio’s canzoni distese and Dante’s Convivio that led to their being linked in the long historiography of Dantean philological speculations. The label “canzoni distese” is taken from Boccaccio’s own indication in his Vita di Dante in MS Toledo, Archivo y Biblioteca Capitulares, Zela- da 104.6, c. 25r (Trattatello §199), a distinction he maintains also later in his edition of the canzoni in MS Chigiano L. V 176, c. 43r: “finiscono le canzoni distese di Dante”.4 The term refers to the group of fifteen Dantean canzoni (all pluristrophic, as per the notation) that Boccaccio transcribed in the same order on three occasions in three different codices (Toledano 104.6, Chigiano L. V. 176, Riccardiano 1035).5 Recently much attention has been given to the claim that Boccaccio took the sequence from an un- known source preceding him, and we shall return to this point. For the moment, it is enough to say that we possess the canzoni distese only through Boccaccio’s transcription, which exists materially and physically as a collected set of works all belonging to the same genre. Boccaccio’s transcription had the effect of creating a homogeneous block of Dante’s lyrics (all canzoni) destined to become canonical: the fifteen “canzoni distese di Dante”. Later anthologists copied Boccaccio, faithfully reproducing the fifteen canzoni distese in the same order in which Boccaccio transcribed them.6

4 We should note, however, that the introductory rubric on c. 34v calls the works simply “canzoni”: Qui cominciano le cançoni del chiaro poeta dante alighieri di firenze. In the earlier Zelada 104.6, they are introduced simply as “cantilene”. 5 De Robertis glosses “‘distese’ (ossia pluristrofiche)” in De Robertis, 2002, vol. I, tome 1, p. xix. Incipits and all textual citations are from this edition. 6 For the reader’s convenience, I list the fifteen canzoni distese in the order in which they appear in Boccaccio’s transcription: Così nel mio parlar vogli’esser aspro; Vo i che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete; Amor che nella mente mi ragiona; Le dolci rime d’amor ch’io solea; Amor che movi tua vertù dal cielo; Io sento sì d’Amor la gran possanza; Al poco giorno ed al gran cerchio d’ombra; Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna; Io son venuto al punto della rota; E’ m’incresce di me sì duramente; Poscia

In his philosophical treatise, Convivio, Dante uses his canzoni as pre- texts and points of departure for a philosophical discourse in prose. After the first, introductory book, the remaining three books of the Convivio begin with a canzone, whose interpretation launches the encyclopedic and philosophical material of the treatise. In books 2 and 3 the relationship between the canzoni and the prose they launch is far from straightfor- ward, for Voi che ’ntendendo and Amor che nella mente are love poems – extremely theologized love poems (as indeed is Donne ch’avete), but love poems nonetheless. They are love poems whose identity as such was thrown into question as a result of being put into the Convivio and subjected to allegorical interpretation. Influenced by the surrounding prose, the editors of the the 1527 print anthology, Sonetti e canzoni di diversi antichi autori toscani7, labeled all the Convivio poems “Canzoni morali di Dante Alaghieri”, even though in fact only the canzone that Dante placed in book 4, Le dolci rime, can properly be called a canzone morale. In book 4 of the Convivio, finally canzone and prose converge: the topic of the poem and the topic of the prose are identical and identically moral. Because Le dolci rime is in effect a lyricized discussion of an ethical topic, in which Dante (perhaps unprecedented in this regard) cites – indeed translates – the Nico- machean Ethics in his lyric poem (Barolini, 2014a), it does not require an allegorical reading in order to lend itself to a philosophical discussion of the same ethical topic in the prose. The ordering of the canzoni in the Convivio is explicitly tied to the philosophical themes of the treatise. From what can be surmised from the presence of only three canzoni in an unfinished text of only four extant books of the fifteen that were planned, the ordering is not so much chronological as it is thematic (there is an autobiographical element in the Convivio, but it quickly fades in the first books). Thus, the process of selection of the canzoni of the Convivio is dictated by the thematic need to fit the canzoni to the varying philosophical subjects of the treatise. Dante states that the Convivio would include and comment upon fourteen canzoni: “La vivanda di questo convivio sarà di quattordici maniere ordinata, cioè quattordici canzoni sì d’amor come di vertù materiate”

ch’Amor del tutto m’ha lasciato; La dispietata mente che pur mira; Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute; Doglia mi reca nello core ardire; Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia. 7 Known as the Giuntina, after its editors and publishers, the Giunti brothers; see De Robertis, 1977.

(Conv. 1.1.14).8 The text that we have contains, as just noted, only three canzoni, two “d’amor” and one “di vertù materiat[a]”. The books that are absent but explicitly announced have led to centuries of speculation on the identity of the other canzoni that the Convivio would have included. I use the term “speculation” rather than “reconstruction” because the absent books of the Convivio, never having been written, cannot be reconstructed. The speculation about the other eleven canzoni that have been im- agined as already chosen and destined for the unwritten books of the Con- vivio is the node at which the reception of the Convivio overlaps with the reception of the rime. This speculation has traditionally been focused on the fifteen canzoni distese copied by Boccaccio, the more so because the three canzoni of the existing books of the Convivio (namely Voi che ’ntendendo, Amor che nella mente, and Le dolci rime) form a compact group at the beginning of Boccaccio’s anthology (preceded only by Così nel mio parlar vogli’esser aspro). This line of argument first took material form in a marginal note of Antonio di Tuccio Manetti in his copy of the Convivio, today in MS Riccardiano 1044, a work he transcribed between 1460 and 1470.9 Beginning with Voi che ’ntendendo, Manetti proposes as the fourteen canzoni of the Convivio a list that corresponds to Boccaccio’s canzoni distese minus the first entry in Boccaccio’s list, Così nel mio parlar. As Beatrice Arduini notes, Manetti’s idea found immediate favor: “Nella tradizione manoscritta di ambito laurenziano diventa quindi canonica l’interpretazione del trattato come commento alle quindici ‘canzoni distese’, come risulta dalla nota esplicativa nel ms. Riccardiano 1044” (Arduini, 2012, p. 98). In 2003 Giuliano Tanturli, following the lead of De Robertis, pro- posed that the grouping of canzoni called the canzoni distese is not Boc- caccio’s. Arduini writes: “alcuni critici italiani – Giuliano Tanturli in più

8 References to the Convivio are drawn from Vasoli, 1988, tome I, part 2. 9 On Manetti and MS Riccardiano 1044 see Arduini, 2012. Arduini describes Manetti’s marginal note containing the canzoni distese thus: “In precedenza, in una nota a carta 13r, realizzata accanto alla trascrizione di Marabottino della prima strofa della canzone Voi che ’ntendendo, Antonio copia le quattordici canzoni che Dante sarebbe stato intenzionato a commentare nel trattato. Nella sua nota Antonio Manetti scrive: ‘Ognuno di questi versi qui disotto è ’l prencipio, cioè el primo verso di ciascuna canzone ch’egli intendeva commentare, che erano xiiii’, e seguono in colonna gli incipit delle canzoni 2–15 con una graffa in corrispondenza di Voi che ’ntendendo, Amor che nella mente, Le dolci rime e l’avvertenza ‘queste sono exposte da lui’” (p. 101).

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 91–114 Critical Philology and Dante’s Rime 99 di un intervento, Lino Leonardi (nella sua Nota sull’edizione De Ro bertis), Natascia Tonelli, e in misura minore Roberto Leporatti – hanno recentemente attribuito l’ordinamento delle quindici distese alla mano di Dante a partire da considerazioni filologiche scaturite dallo spoglio della monumentale edizione delle Rime di Dante curata da Domenico De Ro bertis, mentre Teodolinda Barolini, nella sua altrettanto recente edizione commentata delle Rime dantesche, insiste sulla paternità boccacciana dell’ordinamento” (Arduini, 2012, p. 96). As I hope to make clear in this essay, this is an inaccurate account of my position, in that I would not presume to insist on a Boccaccian paternity for the ordering: I am not a philologist and do not make attributions. Rather, as a critic, I insist on transparency and clarity of argumentation on the part of philologists. My concern in this instance is the following: it is not appropriate to leap from the existence of the canzoni distese prior to Boccaccio – the only point on which De Robertis offers philological considerations that can alter our original thinking – to the fact of their Dantean paternity. As I study the critical record on this topic, I see less a desire to remove the editorship of the canzoni distese from Boccaccio than a desire to impute the authorship of the canzoni distese as a collection to Dante. There is, obviously, no doubt that the individual canzoni belong to Dante. And there are clear historical antecedents for collections similar to Boccaccio’s Dantean canzoni distese that signal the intention of other and earlier editors’ use of some of Dante’s canzoni for such a purpose. The recent proposal according to which the collection, or a form of the collection, of canzoni distese existed before Boccaccio has renewed the old speculative link, dating back to Manetti, between the fifteen canzoni distese and the fourteen canzoni of the unwritten but projected Convivio. This guessing game has been going on for centuries, and continues because of a profound and understandable urge to recover lost Dantean textuality. In the twentieth century the guessing game regarding which canzone was destined for which book of the treatise was played by scholars with little or no transparency as to the fact that they were engaging in nothing more than conjecture, and resulted in the use of reified and uncritical labels attached to certain canzoni indicating their destination for a particular book of the Convivio. For example, the commentaries routinely refer to the canzone Doglia mi reca as “la canzone della liberalità”, although the canzone does not treat liberality. This label came into existence in order to indicate the

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 91–114 100 Teodolinda Barolini canzone’s presumed destination for the presumed book of the Convivio that would have dealt with the virtue of liberality. The label invented to indicate a canzone’s placement in an unwritten book of the Convivio overdetermines interpretation of the canzone itself – one form of hermeneutics thus conditioning another – so that, driven by the conflict between his label and the actual subject matter of the canzone, Contini describes the “canzone of liberality converting into the canzone on avarice”: “finalmente la canzone della liberalità si converte nella canzone dell’avarizia” (Contini, 1965, p. 182). In their commentary to Doglia mi reca Foster and Boyde are candid about their thinking: “From Con. l.viii.18 we know that Dante intended in the fifteenth and last section of that work (which in fact he never wrote) to discuss the virtue of liberality, and it is commonly and plausibly assumed that the discussion would have taken the form of a commentary on the present canzone, Doglia mi reca. Only indirectly, however, is this poem about liberality; directly it is mainly an onslaught on the vice opposed to it, avarice” (Foster-Boyde, 1967, vol. II, p. 295; italics mine).The label “canzone della liberalità”, then, is a kind of shorthand for Dante scholars which has less to do with glossing the poem in question than with building imaginary symmetries between Dante’s existing lyrics and non-existent sections of the Convivio. These formulae are thoughtlessly relayed to new generations of readers: Piero Cudini’s pa- perback edition of 1979 simply repeats Contini’s formulation, informing us that Doglia mi reca “Si svolge, da canzone della liberalità, a canzone dell’avarizia” (Cudini, 1979, p. 246). The acritical practice just described reflects the natural and understandable desire to know what we do not know, and perhaps cannot know, to fill the gaps in the textual record left by the inexorable scissors of “lo tempo [che] va dintorno con le force”, as Dante so memorably puts it in Paradiso 16.9. This can be an honorable desire, which however like all passions must be tempered and checked in order to remain virtuous, and it drives philologists, who, despite their supposed arid objectivity, are not without their passions, their blind spots, and their dreams of glory, as beautifully evoked by Branca in the pages cited at the opening of this essay. From at least the time of Manetti’s transcription of the Convivio, ca. 1460–1470, Boccaccio’s transcription of Dante’s canzoni distese has been connected with the impulse to fill the void that Dante created by abandoning the Convivio. Now, in our supposedly less naïve and more rigorously scientific time, the canzoni distese – in their immaterial pre-Boccaccian form – are again

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 91–114 Critical Philology and Dante’s Rime 101 at the center of critical attention. What is new about the current moment is that a new theory has been grafted onto Manetti’s old theory: the canzoni distese are viewed not just as an outline of the missing books of the Con- vivio but are construed as themselves a new Dantean work, the so-called “libro delle canzoni”. According to this theory, we finally have lyrics, other than those in the Vita Nuova and Convivio, that have been ordered by Dante himself, that have been made by him into a book: we are finally the happy possessors of Dante’s very own lyric sequence. We are thus at a moment when we can track the violation of the boundary between philology and hermeneutics in real time. How then did a hypothesis about the canzoni distese, one that authorizes us only to believe that they existed as an organizational template before Boccaccio, morph into a lost book of Dante’s, already subject to literary analysis and interpretation?10 To answer this question, we must begin with first principles. Because Dante did not collect or order his lyric poems (with the exception of the poems that he eventually placed in the Vita Nuova and Convivio), the editor of the rime has to decide – in the most literal, material, and concrete way – in what order to print the poems. As we know, De Robertis made the decision to stand apart from the editions of the twentieth century, in which Barbi, Contini, and Foster-Boyde arranged Dante’s rime in approx- imate chronological order, and decided instead to follow where possible the traces of the editorial tradition. De Robertis thus substitutes the history of the transmission of the poems for the history of Dante’s development as a poet. Many pages into tome 2 of his two-volume Introduzione, De Robertis outlines the two choices that confront an editor of the rime – the choice of attempting to follow in Dante’s footsteps or the choice of following in the footsteps of previous editors – and he very explicitly chooses to follow the editors: “O si traccia, si rintraccia una storia, la storia beninteso del lavoro poetico di Dante, quella che la stessa Vita Nova per la sua parte adombra e che la secolare interpretazione, tra Otto e Novecento, si è sforzata di perseguire; ovvero si propone una forma, almeno quella che la tradizione, la tradizione del testo delle rime di Dante, ha via via coagulato e sembra autorizzare … con la segreta speranza, magari, che la tradizione rispecchi

10 On the basis of the essays whose argumentation is discussed below, a collection of Dante’s poetry has been published with the title Libro de las canciones y otros poemas (Varela-Portas De Orduña et al., 2014).

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 91–114 102 Teodolinda Barolini la storia del lavoro del poeta o restituisca (tradisca) un’ipotesi ordinatrice” (De Robertis, 2002, vol. II, tome 2, p. 1144). De Robertis thus opts to for- go the attempt to reconstruct “la storia del lavoro poetico di Dante” and to offer us instead “la tradizione del testo delle rime di Dante”. It is important to note that De Robertis does not offer a philological argument for his ordering of the rime. In this crucial passage, where he describes the two paths available to an editor of Dante’s rime, the chronological path (the history of Dante’s poetic development) or the editorial path (the history of the transmission), De Robertis very properly describes a hermeneutic dilemma and he makes a legitimate hermeneutic choice: he prefers to follow traditional forms with respect to the ordering of the rime rather than attempt a chronological arrangement. He is clear about his preference: he prefers to follow the traces of that which exists, the prior editorial arrangements of the rime, rather than hazard an interpretation of his own. At page 1144 of tome 2 of his Introduzione, where De Robertis explicitly confronts the deep logic of his choice and of his edition, he does not resort to a philological argument nor does he refer to the section in the first tome of the Introduzione where he reconstructs the stemma of the canzoni distese (De Robertis, 2002, vol. II, tome 1, section 8, pp. 234–45). Similar- ly, Guglielmo Gorni, in the first published defense of De Robertis’ edition, Sulla nuova edizione delle “Rime” di Dante of 2002, does not offer a philological rationale for De Robertis’ innovations, which are “in the ordering rather than in the text of the poems, in the form rather than in the content”: “di ordinamento piuttosto che di lezione, di forma (in senso tecnico) piuttosto che di sostanza” (Gorni, 2002, p. 577). Gorni knows that, in the case of Dante’s uncollected rime, issues of “ordinamento piuttosto che di lezione” are not susceptible to a philological proof. Unless, that is, we were able in some way to connect the order to Dante. De Robertis’ critical manifesto of intent, as cited above, concludes in a way that was to me, when I first read it in 2002, frankly puzzling. He ex- presses the “secret hope” that in choosing to follow traditional forms he may possibly be recovering Dante’s own original order: “con la segreta speranza, magari, che la tradizione rispecchi la storia del lavoro del poeta o restituisca (tradisca) un’ipotesi ordinatrice”. Was De Robertis’ “secret hope” an en- crypted reference to his stemmatic reconstruction with respect to the canzoni distese? Does the statement on page 1144 of tome 2 of the Introduzione refer back to tome 1, pages 234–245? Although such an interpretation could

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 91–114 Critical Philology and Dante’s Rime 103 hardly be inferred from a neutral reading of page 1144 of the Introduzione back in 2002, more recent argumentation by De Robertis’ followers has focused on the stemmatic reconstruction. Recently, Lino Leonardi has gone so far as to erase De Robertis’ hermeneutic arguments in order to claim that De Robertis based his order of the rime on his stemmatic reconstruction: “La presenza di tale ordine, totale o parziale, anche in altri testimoni che dimostrano di risalire a una fonte superiore a quella grande famiglia (in particolare Add2 e R50: ma parzialmente anche in altri), consente inoltre di ipotizzare che esso precedesse anche l’iniziativa di b. Di qui la sua [di De Robertis] adozione per l’edizione critica, contro la ricomposizione pseudo-cronologica appli- cata da Barbi che era stata seguita in tutte le edizioni precedenti” (Leonar- di, 2014, p. 11).11 With similar inaccuracy, Leonardi goes on to write that my own reasons for rejecting De Robertis’ order are based in my failure to understand the stemmatic reconstruction and in my belief that the canzoni distese are Boccaccio’s: “Barolini ha contestato la scelta di De Robertis, e per il suo commento è tornata all’ordine Barbi: le sue ragioni sono il frutto di un fraintendimento, di una incomprensione degli argomenti stemmatici di De Robertis, che la induce ad attribuire ancora all’iniziativa di Boccac- cio quella seriazione” (Leonardi, 2014, p. 12). It will be apparent from the above citations, and in other attacks on those who do not follow De Ro bertis’ order, how philologists use rhetoric when they lack philology: it is quite remarkable to witness, in a group usually so addicted to chronology, how “chronological” has become a term of abuse.12 Because the porous but essential boundary between philology and interpretation is the topic of this essay, it is important that I here reiterate, with respect to my own motives for not following De Robertis, what I have written many times before. Let me state again, for the record: My reasons for not following De Robertis’ order are completely hermeneutic, not at all philological. I am a literary critic, for whom the value of writing

11 In the interest of philological transparency, Leonardi’s sigle refer to: Add2 is from the British Library in London, MS Additional 26772; R50 is in fact MS Firenze, Riccardiano 1050 (olim O. IV. 40) in Antonio Pucci’s hand. Both are from the first half of the fifteenth century. The sigla ‘b’ indicates the entire and vast family of manuscripts analyzed by De Robertis as having a common ancestor. 12 Leonardi seems to be following Marrani, 2013, whose review of the commentary of Claudio Giunta accuses him of reverting to chronology as an ordering principle (see Giunta, 2011).

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 91–114 104 Teodolinda Barolini a commentary to Dante’s rime resides wholly in the reconstruction of how Dante became Dante, indeed in the connection of the rime to the Comme- dia, a connection that I make more frequently than my predecessors (or successors). For me, the challenge is to tell a story: to narrate the story of Dante’s ideological and poetic development, how he became the poet of the Commedia. I have stated my own goals explicitly since my first essay on this topic, published in 2004: “We have a story to uncover, a history to write. The story of Dante’s becoming requires a chronological arc, and therefore we must accept the responsibility of a chronologically ordered edition despite the lacunae in our knowledge and despite the likelihood of variations between editions. […] The lyrics afford us an unparalleled opportunity to trace the twists and turns in Dante’s ideological and spiritual development, and to gauge how far from complacent and overdetermined his journey was” (Barolini, 2004, pp. 541–42).13 I stated my guiding philosophy again in the Introduction to my Rizzoli commentary of 2009 (“Scritte nell’arco di approssimativamente venticinque anni, sono proprio le rime a offrirci l’accesso al tavolo di lavoro del poeta, lasciandoci intravedere il processo attraverso cui Dante è diventato Dante”), and most recently in the Introduction to my revised and expanded English commentary of 2014: “Written over a period of approximately twenty-five years, the lyrics offer us access to the poet’s workbench, allowing us to glimpse the process through which Dante became Dante” (Barolini, 2009, p. 6; 2014b, pp. 3–4). This is a story that is lost in De Robertis’ edition, for obvious reasons: an edition that begins with Così nel mio parlar, a canzone that was written in 1296, and then goes back in time to canzoni written earlier, jumping about from here to there, cannot possibly tell a coherent story. While we must certainly guard against allowing our readings to be contaminated by greater narrative coherence than these lyrics permit – for instance, we

13 Nella traduzione italiana: “C’è una storia da svelare, una storia da scrivere. La storia dell’evoluzione di Dante richiede un arco cronologico, e dobbiamo quindi accettare la responsabilità di un’edizione cronologicamente ordinata malgrado le lacune nelle nostre conoscenze e la probabilità di varianti tra le edizioni (tali varianti non sono così problematiche come lo sarebbero se noi usassimo abitualmente i numeri per riferirci a queste poesie). Le liriche ci consentono un’opportunità senza pari per tracciare gli spostamenti e le svolte nello sviluppo ideologico e spirituale di Dante, e di valutare quanto il suo percorso sia stato tutt’altro che compiaciuto e senza esitazioni” (Barolini, 2012, p. 423).

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 91–114 Critical Philology and Dante’s Rime 105 must remember that Guido Cavalcanti did not place his poems in the sequence that seems to crescendo, pleasingly, in Favati’s order, with Donna me prega (Favati, 1957), and we must resist the impulse to read the rime petrose as telling a story that begins in Io son venuto and concludes in Così nel mio parlar, as per the typical ordering of these four canzoni – we do not need to fragment the lyrics to the point of dividing Così nel mio parlar from its fellow petrose, as the sequence of the canzoni distese does. Nor do we need to resist the narrativity inherent in time and in history itself: after all, Dante himself existed in time, and wrote his poems in a sequence dictated by the existential history of his life. Why then – when there is total critical consensus on Lo doloroso amor being a canzone that Dante wrote in his youth (as there is, interestingly, consensus on the rough chronology of many if not most of Dante’s poems) – why would I write about Lo doloroso amor last among the canzoni, as De Robertis does? I have no interest in relinquishing the opportunity to illuminate the history of Dante’s development as a poet (the history that has always, since I wrote Dante’s Poets, been my guiding light as a critic). This opportunity is inherent in writing about a poem that has been positioned so that it is preceded and succeeded by the poems that (more or less) preceded and succeeded it in the real unfolding of the poet’s life. The idea that the author of the canzoni distese predates Boccaccio has been taken up in ways that suggest the workings of De Robertis’ “segreta speranza” on the thinking of his disciples. Tanturli titles his 2003 review of the De Robertis edition L’edizione critica delle rime e il libro delle canzoni di Dante, thus inaugurating the use of the phrase “il libro delle canzoni di Dante”. The effect of naming in this kind of debate is to move the object being named, in this case “il libro delle canzoni di Dante”, from hypothetical to less hypothetical to virtually extant: this for instance is the trajectory of the non-existent forms of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta to which Wilkins gave impressive names like “Correggio” and “Johannine”. Tanturli expands on De Robertis’ treatment of the philological reconstruction of the pre- Boccaccian pedigree of the canzoni distese and then goes further: he dis- penses with philology altogether. On the antipenultimate page of his review, the tone shifts, and Tan- turli begins to make interpretive claims. The first poem in the series, Così nel mio parlar, obtained its position because none other is more suited to its task of beginning: “perché null’altro resulta più adatto a aprire di quella sua dichiarazione iniziale d’intento e di poetica” (Tanturli, 2003,

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 91–114 106 Teodolinda Barolini p. 264). Having established that Così nel mio parlar is programmatically positioned as proemial with respect to what follows, Tanturli moves to an almost mystical claim on the metaphysical nature of beginnings and books, avowing that he can deduce from the presence of a beginning the further presence of something “organic”, indeed of a book: “Ma aprire è qualcosa di più che essere la prima: si apre qualcosa che vuole essere organico, un libro, insomma”.14 With that word “organico” Tanturli signals that he is engaging in interpretation of a massively overdetermined variety, as I have demonstrated in my analysis of the critical literature on the Vita Nuova and the rime and the debate on the estravaganti versus the “opera organica” (Barolini, 2004). He then raises the issue of the suitability of Così nel mio parlar’s “poetica dell’asprezza” for all the canzoni (many of which are not aspre), and rapidly concludes that, although not the tone of all fifteen canzoni, asprezza is indeed the dominant tone of the series: “ne risulta il tono dominante”. The final section of Tanturli’s essay is tendentiously interpretive, not philological: thinly hermeneutic, not ecdotic. Between page 264 and the final page 266, he repeats the word libro multiple times, and repeats the same maneuver that he had executed with respect to the nature of beginnings again with respect to the nature of endings. Real books require real beginnings and real endings: “In un libro costruito con pagine bell’e scritte, più che in ogni altro, principio e fine sono l’essenziale, individuandolo e delimitandolo” (Tanturli, 2003, p. 265). From this point the critic moves to the final canzone of the series, and to claiming for it a super-charged importance as a sphragis, a personal seal or signature. Although the personal information contained in the “montanina mia canzon” does not seem very congruent with the classical antecedents, again the idea of a book is paramount in the critic’s thinking: “Con una sphragis si chiude un libro” (ivi, p. 266), and so a sphragis this must be. As to the author of this libro, Tanturli writes: “Ma quello [il De vulgari eloquentia] è un progetto di libro abbandonato. Al suo posto, verrebbe da dire, qualcuno costruì e calibrò quest’altro” (ivi, p. 264). Certain tropes run through the centuries of editorial history of the rime: while Tanturli invokes the “libro organico” trope, Lino Leonardi, in his 2004 review of the De Robertis edition, appeals to the Convivio trope

14 See Wayne Storey’s note on Boccaccio’s use of libro and related terms to describe Dante’s works, published in this same issue of Philology. pp. 115–19.

(Leonardi, 2004). Following his discussion of De Robertis’ thesis that the canzoni distese precede Boccaccio, Leonardi makes an explicit claim for Dantean paternity of the canzoni distese by invoking precisely the absent books of the Convivio. The ancient lacuna and our need to fill it provide the vehicle used by Leonardi to negotiate such a hazardous leap in his argumentation: hazardous indeed, for it is one thing to sustain that the canzoni distese precede Boccaccio, and it is quite another to move from that claim to the assertion that they are Dante’s. Leonardi links the canzoni distese to Dante by appealing to Antonio Manetti’s marginal note in his transcription of the Convivio. Because these are the fourteen canzoni that Manetti claimed Dante “intended to gloss” in the Convivio, we owe their ordering in some measure to Dante’s own hand: “si è tentati di riprendere in considerazione l’ipotesi a lungo dibat- tuta, e registrata dal copista Antonio di Tuccio Manetti nei margini di R44 (e prima ancora nella rubrica collettiva di Naz6), che queste siano le 14 canzoni ‘ch’egli intendeva commentare’ nel Convivio; e che quindi la loro seriazione si debba in qualche misura alla mano di Dante” (ivi, p. 82).15 Leonardi adds hypothetical to hypothetical, concluding with a sentence claiming Dantean paternity for the canzoni distese that begins with “Se così fosse”: “è incerto se Boccaccio conoscesse direttamente il Convivio, la cui tradizione è quasi solo quattrocentesca, e la cui diffusione si ritiene sporadica dal secondo Trecento; tanto meno è probabile che lo conoscesse il responsabile delle ‘distese’, che abbiamo detto De Robertis dimostra precedere Boccaccio. Se così fosse, la coincidenza seriale delle prime tre canzoni non si spiegherebbe se non attribuendo anche l’ordinamento delle 15 distese appunto alla mano di Dante” (ivi, pp. 82–3). Leonardi too cites the “segreta speranza” of De Robertis – indeed, the expressed “secret hope” of the maestro that Boccaccio’s canzoni distese may reflect a Dantean order is the leitmotif of all these contributions – and com- ments on the “prudenza di De Robertis” in leaving as “appunto solo una speranza” what he, Leonardi, considers incontrovertible: “In effetti, è diffi- cile – e tanto più encomiabile risulta la prudenza di De Robertis – resistere

15 In the interest of philological transparency, R44 is De Robertis’s sigla for Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardiana 1044 (olim O. I. 26), and Naz6 is Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze II. iv. 126 (olim Magliabechiano VII. 1336). Both are fifteenth-century tran- scriptions in Antonio Manetti’s hand, an equally worthwhile notation, both philologically and ideologically speaking.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 91–114 108 Teodolinda Barolini alla tentazione di avvicinarla davvero all’autore, quell’ ‘ipotesi ordinatrice’ che comunque trapela dietro la serie delle canzoni” (ivi, pp. 82, 80, 82). Unwillingness to resist the temptation of creating a new Dantean text is the hallmark of Natascia Tonelli’s review of De Robertis’ edition, which offers a lengthy reading of the so-called “libro delle canzoni” (Tonelli, 2006). Tonelli relies overtly on the philological authority of Tanturli as the foundation of her hermeneusis; she refers her readers to his “importantissima recensione” where we can attain “la disamina approfondita dei fattori fi lologici” (ivi, p. 31). She then moves immediately on to a literary analysis of the thematic and lexical linkages between the fifteen canzoni in the order in which we have them from Boccaccio, treating them as though she were analyzing the incipits of fifteen poems in sequence in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. The result, by the way, is to show that the so-called “libro delle canzoni” is a rather modest work, judging from the arid lexical linkages between incipits that make up the bulk of Tonelli’s literary analysis. Eventually she asks “Possiamo ipotizzare che sia stato Dante ad ordinare le sue canzoni?” and we can be sure of the reply: she promises us a book in which she will detail her arguments for Dante’s paternity, “giacché sono convinta dell’autorialità della raccolta, dell’ordinamento, del canzoniere” (ivi, pp. 50–3). A new work of Dante’s, a “canzoniere” in fact, has thus been added to the canon. Tonelli’s arguments for the Dantean “autorialità della raccolta, dell’ordinamento, del canzoniere”, betray – in the lexicon “raccolta”, “ordinamen- to”, and “canzoniere” – the same overdetermined ideological roots that have nourished past debates on the “libro organico” of the Vita Nuova versus the rime estravaganti. The defensive posture that has governed discussions of Dante’s rime, texts found lacking with respect to the “raccolta organica” that is the Vita Nuova on the one hand and the “raccolta organica” that is the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta on the other, is evident in the talismanic words with which Contini begins the “Nota al testo” to his edition of the rime: “Dante non raccolse organicamente le sue liriche” (Contini, 1965, pp. 283).16

16 I noted in 2004 how Petrarch’s choices condition those of editors of Dante’s Rime: “De Robertis too can be seen to be responding to Petrarch, in a way that we can better understand by contrasting him to Contini. Whereas Contini’s ‘Dante non raccolse organicamente le sue liriche’ responds to Petrarch defensively, De Robertis adopts an aggressive stance vis-à-vis the Petrarchan legacy, as though he were preemptively making sure that we never commit the sin of associating Dante’s lyrics with an ordered and sequenced canzoniere” (Barolini, 2004, p. 537).

Once the canzoni distese are detached from Boccaccio, and once the barrier of temporality is removed by placing the canzoni distese before Boccaccio, the logic of Contini’s dictum prevails and the temptation proves irresistible: the temptation to show that Dante did in fact create a “raccolta organica”. Interestingly, while Dante’s canzoni are individually great, very little of critical value has been gained from scrutiny of the order in which the canzoni have been placed. If we compare the so-called “libro delle canzoni” to, for instance, the series of five canzoni that Petrarch designates canzoni 125 to 129 of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, we see the difference between a series of canzoni in which the order is fundamentally inert and a series in which the abstract principle of order has itself been genially devised and manipulated in order to exploit the idea of chronological succession – a series in which the order is alive and dynamic (on canzoni 125–129 as a series see Barolini, 2009b). Much effort has been expended to acquire a new canzoniere of Dante’s on which to practice hermeneusis, when indeed the very lack of hermeneutic payoff may be taken as a signal that the assignment to Dante of this new text rests on flawed assumptions. Overlooked in the rush to claim a new Dantean canzoniere is the inner logic of the Convivio, its quiddity, the rationale of its “bookness” in spite of its unfinished nature. The Convivio is based on principles of construction that are unlike those of a raccolta or canzoniere. We cannot deduce how Dante might have organized his rime outside the Convivio from how he organized the canzoni he placed within it. In other words, even if we knew, as we emphatically do not, that the fifteen canzoni eventually transcribed by Boccaccio (minus the first,Così nel mio parlar) were destined by Dante to be the fourteen canzoni of the Convivio, and in the same order, we still do not arrive at insight into the organizational principle of a possible lost Dantean canzoniere. The organization of the rime within the Convivio, all canzoni, does not necessarily mirror the order in which Dante would have arranged his rime, not all canzoni, outside of the Convivio. The Convivio follows its own criterion of order, determined by the philosophical topics treated by the prose. It is a work of prose that anthologizes rather than orders its canzoni, and whose logic is dictated by the thematic/philosophical arguments of the prose. The Convivio does not and cannot provide a template for how Dante would have ordered a freestanding collection of lyrics. Another of the incorrect assumptions governing this theory is that Dante would have followed the principle of the Duecento manuscripts, in which, as Gorni puts it, “the

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 91–114 110 Teodolinda Barolini canzoni always come first”: “L’opzione di De Robertis trova un suppor- to nell’ordinamento dei canzonieri storici duecenteschi, in cui le canzoni precedono sempre” (Gorni, 2002, p. 588). De Robertis’ decision to adapt Dante’s lyrics to the conventional ordering of Duecento and Trecento canzonieri, in which the canzoni are placed first, should be scrutinized in a historical context that includes the innovations for which Dante is so well known. We know that Dante was not tied to the model of the conventional canzoniere, in which the canzoni are placed first, because he unveils in the Vita Nuova what is effectively a new kind of Duecentocanzoniere : one in which the poems are presented as though in chronological order. Moreover, in the Vita Nuova Dante spearheads another innovation that will be adopted by Petrarch in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, along with the principle of tenuous chronological order: he does not hesitate to desegregate the various lyrical genres, placing sonnets and even one ballata before the first canzone. The story of the so-called “libro delle canzoni di Dante” is a chapter in the history of the unstable and porous boundaries between philology and interpretation. In its essence it is the story of how a very great philologist, who mistakenly believed that he could keep interpretation out of his work altogether, nonetheless opened the door to unbridled and irre- sponsible interpretation. In the last sentence of his review of De Robertis, Tanturli writes: “Ma se, come la recensio del De Robertis dimostra, per quanto si penetri in alto, o si trova quel libro o sue tracce consistenti e rivelatrici, vale la pena di stare al gioco e non buttar via ciò che dopo non lunga eclissi l’ecdotica ha recuperato” (Tanturli, 2003, p. 266). This gioco is founded on the principle stated in these final words, which in effect function as a seal of infallibility: this “libro” is what “l’ecdotica ha recuperato”, what philology has wrested from oblivion. And yet the arguments for a conjectured “libro delle canzoni” shift from the philological to the rhetorical tropes that are the staples of this editorial tradition. These are rhetorical arguments that hardly provide a solid foundation of empirical fact on which to build our interpretive castles, and certainly do not provide the basis for inventing a new Dantean text. Fifteen years ago, in 2000, I spoke with De Robertis in New York, on the occasion of a Cavalcanti conference held at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura. I took notes immediately following the conversation, in which I tried to persuade De Robertis to include all the poems subsequently included by Dante in the Vita Nuova in his forthcoming edition. He told me that, although he believed that all the poems subsequently included in the

Vita Nuova pre-existed the libello (with the possible exception, he said, of Donna pietosa17), it was not his job to intervene vis-à-vis our reception and interpretation; he was a philologist, he said, and hence deals only with what he can materially show. One cannot help but wonder, years later: why is material existence so important in the case of the poems later included in the Vita Nuova, but not at all important with respect to the pre-Boccaccian list of the canzoni distese? As a direct consequence of the stance described above, De Robertis’ edition includes only the thirteen Vita Nuova poems that he can show existed prior to the libello (with the addition, unexplained, of A ciascun’alma), with the result that the Edizione Nazionale of Dante’s lyrics excludes poems of uncontested Dantean paternity and some that we know (in the case of Donne ch’avete) were in circulation before the libello18. When I suggest- ed to Professor De Robertis that he had already entered the interpretive debate, that his 1980 edition of the Vita Nuova was by far the most advanced in illuminating hermeneutically the discrepancies between the poems and the subsequently added prose (De Robertis, 1980), and that he was therefore erecting too rigid a boundary between philology and interpretation, he replied: “Quel confine è tutto per me”.19 In conclusion, we come back to the boundary between philology and interpretation, a boundary that, precisely because it can never be absolute, requires our disciplined vigilance and transparency – requires, in other words, that we practice a critical philology. In the context of Dante’s rime, the practice of critical philology requires acknowledgment that any order is always already an interpretation, and that there is no such animal as an order that is interpretation-neutral. I advocate for preservation of De Robertis’ confine, but with the humility to recognize, as Branca reminds us, that we, as mortals, will want to cross it.

17 I do not agree with this exception, for reasons explained in my commentary to Donna pietosa; see Barolini, 2014b, p. 207. 18 The reader who is interested in the hermeneutic issues latent in the exclusion and inclusion of the Vita Nuova poems from editions of Dante’s lyrics should consult Barolini, 2004, and the Introduction to Barolini, 2009a, or 2014b. 19 From my notes recording a private conversation held on November 10, 2000 at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura of New York. And see, in the same vein, the letter of De Robertis to Paolo Trovato: Molinari-Tanturli, 2013, pp. 189–90.

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