«L’Ellisse» was created with the aim of investigating Italian literature from the Origins to the 20th century, using the tools of textual philology and according to a perspective that is attentive to historical development and socio-geographical contexts. The works, in their birth and structure on the author’s desk, as well as in the stages of their fortune, will be at the centre of the investigations, within an approach that considers philological analysis a fundamental moment in literary interpretation.

Within this framework, essays on the author’s papers and variants, on the actual and decisive stratification of sources within the body of texts, on the manuscript or printed tradition of the works and on their incidence in literary history will be flanked by research into hitherto little-explored territories and the publication of previously unpublished materials.

The reconnaissance of the manuscript patrimony will move from individual authors, not stopping at mere erudite communication but with the aim of understanding the eminently historical nature of literary production and to arrive, over time and through the coordination of investigations, at an outline of circumscribed cultural environments. With the same intent, we will tackle identified areas of the printed heritage: reasoned censuses and the recovery of forgotten or little-known works will be the priorities in this field. Our conviction is that this is the way to restore the connective tissue within which the classics of Italian literature mature and must be understood.

We will also pay special attention to the production of philosophical, scientific, philological and antiquarian works and, in this way, to the presence of Latin in Italian culture in the modern age. The intention is to bring to the surface an aspect of our literature, the one pertaining to the vast continent of Neo-Latin, that is only partially known, and the dense connections that bind it to other disciplinary fields.

Following these broad lines of enquiry, we therefore aim to publish essays in which no dichotomy is registered between philological analysis and critical interpretation: the usefulness, even the necessity, of a synergy between the two moments is the assumption with which we present ourselves to our readers.