Philological paths: critical editions of Vico, Vallisneri and Cattaneo

Critical Edition of the Works of G.B.Vico

The project for the critical edition of the complete works of Giambattista Vico, now published by Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura in Rome, was presented by Pietro Piovani in 1972, and arose from the need to return to the original Vico texts by amending them from the arbitrary interventions introduced by Benedetto Croce and especially Fausto Nicolini. Indeed, Croce’s and Nicolini’s work conditioned and directed the reading of Vico by subsequent generations of scholars, accustoming them to a completely modernized spelling, to absolutely comprehensible punctuation, to a single typeface with no diversifications. Their first and foremost aim, in fact, was to offer a ‘readable’ Vico. However – as the work on the various versions of the Scienza nuova in particular demonstrates – this communicative intent ended up paying the price of a substantial standardisation of Vico’s thought, which emphasised its homogeneity without complexity. The Vico editions that followed Nicolini’s work were affected by this same approach for a long time. On the contrary, the approach inaugurated by the ISPF’s Critical Edition was thus based on the rejection of the model provided by Nicolini to the advantage of the original editions, in order to directly confront the pathologies and problems they raise.