EXCEPTIONAL TAXIAN FINDING.
This is the autograph sonnet n.1491 delle Rime, learned from various witnesses but unknown in the present autograph version . Addressed to Vincenzo Caracciolo, it was originally sent by Tasso together with another sonnet but never reached the addressee, as stated in the letter 1287 of 12 November 1590 [New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, ms. MA 462 33 = T]:
“(…) I was cheated of two other sonnets written to V.S. I have lost the copy of the first, sent to you by Fiorenza along the road of Signor Fabritio Caraffa; of the other the Serbian, and I will try to copy it. (…) ”
The current finding concerns precisely this second sonnet, which was to accompany the letter n.1281 of 28 September 1590. The original autograph text allows us to identify with certainty the recipient of the poem, still in square brackets in the critical edition, confirming lessons and forms already transmitted by tradition. In both letters, Tasso invoked the help of his Neapolitan friends, the usual requests for help from the Neapolitan nobility, having already had the insurance of a provision of 600 scudi a year from the Caracciolo family. Help that had never come to him.
"With the Neapolitan environment - noble and literate - over the years he has woven a dense web of correspondence that intensifies at the moment of his arrival in the city. Here "requested by relatives and friends and by many gentlemen who wished each of them to retain him on his own, if, not being able to satisfy everyone, and not wanting to miss anyone, he decided to lodge with the fathers of the monastery of Monte Oliveto, from which it had been through the work of the abbot Don Nicolo degli Oddi long awaited, and was received with great honor and kindness "13. In the image of Naples described by Giulio Cesare Capaccio in the pages of the six-day dialogue between a" forastiero " and a "citizen", the monastery of Monteoliveto assumes a position of strong importance, amplified through the memory of the stay of the important characters whom 10 had chosen as a privileged abode. (...)
And, in the convent, it is at the center of an elite of intellectuals and nobles who periodically visit it, attracted by the fame of the poet of Jerusalem. On this occasion he also met Vincenzo and Pier Antonio Caracciolo, renewed his friendship with Ascanio Pignatelli, his colleague in Padua in the Accademia degli Eterei; moreover, he is concerned with maintaining relations with the Prince of Stigliano 19, with the Duke of Nocera, with the Marquis of Gerace and with other notables of the city. " ("I sing the arms and '1 sovereign cavalier" Catalog of manuscripts and Tassian editions (16th-19th centuries) in the National Library of Naples Bibliographic and iconographic exhibition (Naples, 23 October 1996 - 10 January 1997), Naples, 1996, p.).
As Emilio Russo emphasizes in his recent contribution of 2016 on the Taxian correspondence, the various letters are some of the " many tiles of the Tassian relationship with the Neapolitan world ", where Vincenzo Caracciolo is celebrated by Tasso with his family in a couple of sonnets of 1588 (Rime, 1408 and 1412), and then taken on as one of the protection poles in the autumn of 1590, after Tasso's return from Florence to Rome, and in the hypothesis of a new passage to Naples (see for example the Letters, 1279 and 1288, addressed to Francesco Polverino, and 1282, addressed to Caracciolo himself; see also Rime, 1491-1492).
Other interesting the documents of the time, carefully collected by an Anglo-Saxon admirer and preserved in a prestigious amateur's binding. First of all, the letter from Leonora d’Este, the alleged love flame of Tasso, to whom the nineteenth-century tradition has attributed a romantic role that is almost certainly unjustified. Everything comes from a couple of poems dedicated to her, Pray to God for the health of Madame Leonora, and the splendid song While cha venerar movon le genti ; "From this last song depart many of the inferences that made Tasso and Leonora a couple with an unhappy and troubled love: a legend that the whole of the nineteenth century and a large part of the criticism of the twentieth century accepted and even nourished" ( Treccani, online ). The other two letters from the Duke of Ferrara, but no less interesting, bear witness to the Ferrara cultural milieu that wanted to be celebrated here. Tasso and his friends, in the splendid setting of Ferrara in the second half of the 16th century.
The curious and intriguing story of the volume, certainly assembled in the British area at the beginning of the twentieth century by a collector fond of Tasso and passionate about the events of the Este house; therefore present in a sale by the antique dealer William Schab, Catalog No. 19. Rare Books and Manuscripts of theXVth, XVIth, and XVIIth Centuries , circa 1950. In 1955 the news of the purchase in London of this volume at the Sotheby's auction house by an Italian bookseller, later identified with Gaspare Casella of Naples, will be released; the announcement was immediately spread in Italy by an Ansa agency and taken up by "Il Giornale d’Italia della Domenica" in a piece by Orazio Carratelli: "Insured for Culture - Two personal letters from the Este family together with the Tasso sonnet." The following passages are not known, but it is evident that the passion for collecting has allowed this precious Taxian witness to be preserved up to the present day, keeping all its charm intact.