Welcome to
Leggo Manzoni

The project Leggo Manzoni, conceived by Paola Italia and Francesca Tomasi of the FICLIT Department of the University of Bologna, was launched in 2019 within the framework of the PRIN 2017 project “Manzoni Online: unpublished manuscripts and documents, tradition and translation” (prot. 2017CFZFAY). The project is coordinated by da Giulia Raboni (University of Parma) in collaboration with DH.arc Centre at the University of Bologna.

The platform offers access to the full text of the 1840-42 edition of I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) accompanied by the original images and forty critical comments (LEGGO MANZONI), ten translations (TRADUCO MANZONI) and the digitisation and metadata of the original printed Quarantana (VEDO MANZONI).

LEGGO / I READ MANZONI*

Leggo Manzoni. Quaranta commenti alla Quarantana makes available, in a freely consultable web environment, the 1840-42 edition of the Promessi sposi (The Betrothed) accompanied by images and forty critical commentaries to allow an ‘immersive’ reading of the novel, with the guidance of the main scholars of Manzoni's work.

Leggo Manzoni is not only a scientific project, but also a shared workshop between the University and High Schools. The project has developed thanks to the active participation of 20 secondary schools throughout Italy in two PCTO (Percorso per le Competenze Trasversali e l'Orientamento) cycles: “Adopt a commentary on the Promessi Sposi”, organized by Paola Italia with Beatrice Nava and Ersilia Russo, in 2019-2020 and in 2021-2022. The initiative is dedicated to developing textual and digital skills, teaching students how to recognise authoritative sources and texts on the web, and to introducing them to the basics of digital philology. In 30 hours of lessons, carried out in presence and online, guided by University tutors Beatrice Nava and Ersilia Russo, more than 30 teachers and 500 students contributed to the digitisation and XML/TEI encoding of critical comments on The Betrothed. The project then continued with the collaboration of two students from the University of Bologna's Digital Humanities and Digital Knowlegde course: Mariia Levchenko and Giulia Menna, who contributed to the development and implementation of the platform.

Leggo Manzoni offers:

  • The full novel with text and images: it is possible to read the novel, in the 1840-42 version, accompanied by the original cartoons that were an integral part of the editorial project. This allows an ‘immersive’ reading of the work as envisioned by Manzoni, after twenty years of work.
  • Forty commentaries: from the ‘historical’ commentary by Policarpo Petrocchi to the most recent scholastic ones, Manzoni's text is explained, linguistically and thematically, through forty commentaries. These highlight significant passages of the texts, offering an overview of Manzonian criticism and compare different interpretative points of view on a work that has solicited, over time, different reactions and on which the culture of an entire nation is built.

We would like to thank the authors of the commentaries for allowing the use of their texts, and in particular Mariarosa Bricchi who made her full commentary available.

*The project is under development and currently includes the images of the Introduction and Chapter I, the full commentaries by Luigi Russo, Mariarosa Bricchi and Giorgio Petrocchi, and partial commentaries or Introduction and Chapter I by other commentators. The index of comments lists the chapters currently available; this section will be updated as new comments are added.

Go to Leggo

TRADUCO / I TRANSLATE MANZONI*

Thanks to an algorithm that allows the automatic creation of multilingual digital editions of literary works using neural models (Levchenko 2024), the project offers access to fifteen translations of the novel in French, English, German, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Russian and Chinese. These translations can be viewed individually or in parallel, in order to simultaneously compare translation choices relating to the same portions of the text.

Many thanks to Zhang Shihua and Michael Moore, for generously permitting the reproduction of Introduction and Chapter I of the Chinese and English translations.

*The project is under development and currently includes fifteen translations of the work: six complete translations and nine containing the Introduction and Chapter I. This section will be progressively updated with new chapters of existing translations and new translations. For details on available chapters for each translation, please consult the translations index.

Go to Traduco

RICERCO / I SEARCH MANZONI

Ricerco Manzoni presents the digital concordances of The Betrothed, which make it possible to carry out both quantitative investigations on the text – measuring how often words occur – and qualitative ones – identifying the relationships between them.

The concordances we present here also make it possible to consult the locuzioni of the novel, that is, those groups of two or more words that form a single grammatical or lexical unit.

The search can therefore be carried out in two ways: by words or by phrases (locuzioni).

  • The search by WORDS finds all occurrences of a word in the text. The search bar allows you to extract the exact form of the entered word, or all the forms that characterize it (for example, searching for a verb in the infinitive returns all of its conjugated forms). Concordances can be sorted by chapter, left context, and right context. On the left side of the screen, a section lists the most frequent lemmas, sorted alphabetically.
  • The search by PHRASES (locuzioni) works like the word search but, instead of returning single words, it provides a list of the phrases that contain the word of interest. On the left, a section presents the keywords of the phrases found in the text. The phrases are divided into four types:
    • BI ‘irreversible binomial’: a pair of words that occur together and cannot be inverted. E.g. sano e salvo, botta e risposta, vivo o morto.
    • EI ‘idiomatic expression’: a fixed phrase condensing a metaphorical meaning. E.g. avere sangue freddo, avere il mestolo in mano, essere la bocca della verità.
    • P ‘standardized comparison’: a simile that, due to its exemplarity, has become stereotypical. E.g. dare via come i confetti, lesto come un gatto, tremare come una foglia.
    • Pr ‘proverbs and proverbial sayings’: popular sayings and maxims, recognizable for their didactic and moralizing content. E.g. l'abito non fa il monaco, il lupo cambia il pelo ma non il vizio, di necessità virtù.
Go to Ricerco

VEDO / I SEE MANZONI

Vedo Manzoni presents, through a dedicated section of of the Digital Library of the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies at the University of Bologna, the complete reproduction of the Quarantana and the metadata of the iconographic apparatus. This allows users to select the 505 vignettes throughout the various thematic paths.

Go to Vedo

DOCUMENTATION

The technical documentation of the project is available in the GitHub repository.