The annotations made by an author on books he has read or consulted can provide valuable pointers to his literary background and evidence of particular moments in his thinking. Manzoni is indeed exemplary in this respect. In the well-stocked library in his house on the via del Morone, there are numerous books with his annotations, including books on philosophy, history, literature, and dictionaries of various sorts. By following the long trail of notes left on the books on philosophy, for example, we can create a map of his ongoing and in-depth reflection on the authors fundamental to his thinking, including the seventeenth century philosophers and moralists (such as the Port-Royal Jansenist philosophers), the Enlightenment thinkers and the Romanticists. Most importantly of all, however, is the dense collection of annotations that fills the seven volumes of the Vocabolario della Crusca (the Verona edition of 1806). The annotations on these volumes are copious, covering almost all the available space on each page, including the whitespace between columns. Manzoni himself joked about the extent of the notes on his Crusca dictionary, the most important dictionary of the Tuscan (and therefore “Italian”) language of the time. His annotations represent a phase in his long and tormented study on the Italian language, but they are important especially because they take us into his workshop on the novel itself, and into the linguistic revision that followed his prima minuta (“first draft”), namely, Fermo e Lucia. It was Manzoni’s search for suitable Tuscan words and expressions to substitute the many inconsistencies in his draft (including Lombardisms, Gallicisms and Latinisms) that led him to annotate each item in detail.

Manzoni’s copy of the Crusca Dictionary [in A. Manzoni, Edizione nazionale ed europea delle opere, vol. 24, Milan, CNSM, 2005]