Gli Amori di Ludovico Savioli. Edizione critica, commento e studio.

Abstract

My thesis offers the critical edition of the Amori, a collection of poems by Ludovico Savioli (1729-1804) which was published for the first time in 1765 in Lucca and then became one of the best-selling eighteenth-century lyrical books. An in-depth search has revealed forty-two editions of the Amori, twenty-one of which published during the author’s life. No critical edition or commentary exists to date of a text that constitutes one of the most original and successful ‘modernisations’ of classical erotic poetry.
The first stage of the research consisted in establishing the text through the study of editions, and entailed the investigation of the progressive expansion of the collection after a very first edition entitled Rime, printed in 1758 and including twelve odes, rather than twenty-four as the last one. No manuscript of the Amori written by the author’s hand is known but three of the forty-two editions of the collection were certainly overseen by him. For this reason, each of the three printings has been studied to establish the text in a form that could respect Savioli's last will as accurately as possible. The research process and the documents regarding this first step are presented and discussed in the chapter entitled Nota al testo .
The second and the most consistent part of the thesis is devoted to the commentary on the Amori. Together with information regarding the genesis of each individual text and its sources of inspiration, the commentary sheds light on the distinctive characteristics of Saviolian poetics. In its final version, the Amori collection was composed of 24 poems (1830 verses) drawing inspiration from the Latin erotic and elegiac traditions, as is shown by the very title Amori which alludes to Ovid’s Amores. The influence of classical models is evident, and Ovid is a constant presence in Savioli’s elegant verse. Yet his selection of amorous situations is clearly inspired by the typical atmosphere of eighteenth-century drawing rooms and urban settings, for which the poet devised a very personalised style.
A systematic study of lexical choices, themes (a combination of realistic scenes and mythological comparisons) and stylistic patterns has been conducted in order to offer a first comprehensive evaluation of Savioli’s poetics, which represents one of
the most significant testimonies of the transition from early eighteenth-century classicism to Rococo and Neoclassical style, and remained a model for later poets until the Romantic Age.
The last phase of the research has been focused on summarising data emerged from the commentary. I provided a first overview on Savioli’s poetics, in order to shed new light on his prominent role as a poet in eighteenth-century Italian cultural environment. This part of the study includes an analysis of Savioli’s style, poetic language, and sources of inspiration; observations on themes and structure of Amori, and a first study of both the success of Amori and the ways in which it influenced later major poets, such as Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo.