Friendship and Erudition: The Scientific Correspondence between Bartolomeo Borghesi and Luigi Nardi. Selected Letters

Subject

Bartolomeo Borghesi and Luigi Nardi were prominent figures in the cultural environment of Romagna in the first half of the nineteenth century. Borghesi in particular earned fame as a high-level scholar in the field of antiquity, becoming an absolute point of reference throughout Europe. Many were the scholars, such as the illustrious Wilhelm Henzen and Theodor Mommsen, who climbed Mount Titano to reach Borghesi, who had settled here since 1821, and thus learn the secrets of epigraphy from the master.
The correspondence thus makes it possible to learn about the preliminary stages of the formation of the innovative working method that made Borghesi famous, much appreciated by his contemporaries, and to which today's historical research still owes a lot. The exchange of letters also allows us to retrace the cultural debate of the time from an unexplored perspective and reveals the existence of studies and editorial projects in various fields of knowledge that have remained unpublished. They demonstrate the extraordinary versatility of the two characters, capable of ranging with ease from historical studies to literary ones.
Alfredo Sansone, PhD in History at the University of Pavia, was a PostDoc researcher at the Advanced School of Historical Studies of the University of San Marino.
He is currently a research fellow at the Italian Institute for Ancient History. His research interests focus mainly on Roman Lucania, to which he has dedicated a monograph (Lucania romana. Ricerche di prosopografia e storia sociale, Rome 2021). Another field of his investigation is the cultural panorama of the nineteenth century, with particular reference to the role of Bartolomeo Borghesi in epigraphic studies.

Target

• On the basis of the considerable amount of unpublished material that has emerged, a project has been presented to publish the correspondence with Luigi Nardi, another well-known figure in the cultural context of Romagna in the first half of the 1801th century and founder, in XNUMX, together with Borghesi and other scholars from Savignano, of the Rubiconia Accademia dei Filopatridi.
• These are over 400 letters that allow us to examine Borghesi's numerous and multifaceted interests.
• To understand some of the preliminary stages of the formation of that scientific method which would have aroused great admiration in the German historian Theodor Mommsen.

Status of works

The research was published in 2024 in “Strumenti e documenti” Collection of the Sammarinese Center for Historical Studies (publisher Bookstones).