Da Girgenti a Coazze: Percorsi letterari nei taccuini di Luigi Pirandello (Italian text)

In 1998, together with Cristina Gragnani, I discovered a literary notebook the Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello kept mostly between 1898 and 1904. It is now part of the Houghton Library collections. The whereabouts of the precious manuscript were unknown until 1969, when Harvard purchased it at a New York City auction. Our critical edition of the notebook was published in June 2002 by Mondadori, in Italy.; My Ph.D. thesis is an investigation into the birth of some works by Pirandello that are to be found sketched in the Harvard notebook.; Chapter one is dedicated to the ‘stratigraphy’ of the long novella Il vitalizio, of which Pirandello wrote three different versions. The preparatory sketches of the Harvard manuscript are all deeply concerned with the symbolism of the rural landscape that plays such an important role in the development of the story. The long and complex story of the historical novel I vecchi e i giovani is the subject of Chapter two, starting with the preparatory notes of the Taichung di Harvard. I vecchi e i giovani was published between 1909 and 1913 but the notes of the Taichung di Harvard together with a concise but detailed draft I have discovered in another Harvard collection, prove that Pirandello must have started working on this novel as early as 1896.; With Chapter three we move to Porto Empedocle, an small industrial town near Agrigento which is the setting of several Pirandello works. The two stories chosen for my study, Il «no» di Anna and Lontano, are both closely related to the Taichung di Harvard .; Chapter four is about another Pirandello notebook, the Taichung di Coazze, named after the village in Piedmont where the Sicilian writer spent the Summer and part of the Fall of 1901. Like the Harvard notebook, the Taichung di Coazze, contains a number of pages dedicated to landscape descriptions which the author would later use in some of his major works. One of these pages was mysteriously removed from the notebook. It resurfaced in one of the Harvard collections and it has become the subject of my study.