Online portal dedicated to Alessandro Manzoni's writings and library

The new portal dedicated to Alessandro Manzoni, Manzoni Online, is now accessible to everyone: a virtual space that collects the Manzonian corpus of papers, volumes and works, including both published and unpublished ones, currently divided among the funds of the Braidense National Library, Casa Manzoni in Milan and Villa Manzoni in Brusuglio. The portal is aimed at scholars, researchers but also readers, interested in the synthetic presentation and cataloging of the writer’s works, manuscripts, letters and library. It is the widest possible digital reproduction of the documents.

Introducing it was Brera Art Gallery director James Bradburne: “This is a model of what a contemporary library should do,” he said. “We hope it will be a stimulus for similar digitization and enhancement activities of other literary archives,” added the director of the Braidense National Library, Maria Goffredo.

The portal is being set up and allows partial access to the resources for now, which will gradually be made public once completed.
The bibliography is continuously growing and includes the retrieval of the entire historical criticism.

The Manzoni Online project responds to strictly scientific needs, but also to the need to protect and preserve digitally the great paper heritage of Italian libraries. The platform will provide access to exhaustive cataloging of the manuscript and library corpus that belonged to the author, allowing Italian and foreign scholars direct access to Manzonian materials.

The portal is the result of a collaborative project between scholars from the Universities of Parma, Milan, Pavia, Lausanne, Bologna and Rome with the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense (BNB) and the Centro Nazionale di Studi Manzoniani (CNSM). Funded by the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Cultural Heritage with regard to the digitization of the manuscripts and books of the Braidense Library’s Manzonian Fund, the project relied on the collaboration of scholars who have been engaged for years in the field of Manzonian studies and numerous students from the universities involved-a system of synergies between conservation and research institutions that constitutes one of the strengths of this initiative.

Image: Francesco Hayez, Portrait of Alessandro Manzoni (1841; oil on canvas, 120 x 92.5 cm; Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera)

Online portal dedicated to Alessandro Manzoni's writings and library

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