The correspondence between José Nicolás de Azara and Giambattista Bodoni. Edition of letters and drafts

Abstract

In this work the reconstruction of the private epistolary maintained between the Spanish diplomat José Nicolás de Azara and his Italian friend Giambattista Bodoni is proposed from the edition of his preserved letters and drafts. The implicit historical-philological difficulties and limitations are exposed due to the work with unfixed texts such as minutes and even uncertain, because they do not offer a true testimony of the supposed delivery nor of the text version finally written. Moreover, it arises the problem of censorship in the case of the Azara’s archive, as well as self-censorship with regard to Bodoni's extensive epistolary file, kept in the Palatine Library of Parma and in which it can be noticed a selective tendency in the conservation of documents, intervention of the typographer that constitutes a clear attempt to shape his own future memory.