Una « corrispondenza che potrebb’essere utilissima alla Republica letteraria… ». Lettere di Angelo Mai a Ottavio Fraja Frangipane nell’Archivio di Montecassino. Contributo ad una storia delle relazioni culturali in Italia nella prima metà del sec. XIX

Abstract

This paper, accompanied by the edition of fifteen letters addressed by Angelo Mai Prefect of the Vatican Library to the Benedictine monk Ottavio Fraja Frangipane Prefect of the Montecassino Archives, intends to contribute to the history of cultural relations in Italy in the early 19th century, between 1820 and 1840. It is not by chance that the correspondence from the beginning (letter no. 2 of 1823) is marked by the awareness of the cultural role of the two correspondents, both engaged and lucky in bringing to light literary texts of which the traces had been lost over the centuries. On the one hand Mai recognizes in the Cassinese archivist the worthy and glorious publisher of the new Sermones of St. Augustine published in 1819, and on the other hand he is honored to make a gift to Fraja Frangipane of a copy of Cicero’s De Re Publica, which he had in the same year 1819 clamorously discovered in the palimpsest manuscript Vat. lat. 5757. With these two respective credentials the two scholars exchange letters in which Mai shows all the thirst for research and new discoveries, and Fraja Frangipane provides him answers, suggestions or original contributions, which Mai punctually welcomes in the editorial series edited by him as the Scriptorum veterum nova collectio. Similarly both, although in different but complementary roles performed within two well-deserving cultural institutions such as the Vatican Library and the Cassinese Archives, get in contact and collaborate in the research that three great exponents of the emerging Germanic historiography, Niebuhr, Bluhme and Pertz, carry out in those years in the libraries and archives of Rom and Italy.