Un romanzo epistolare italiano nel Tournant des Lumières: Per questi dilettosi monti di Carlo Botta

Lumières: Per questi dilettosi monti di Carlo Botta The essay aims to propose an analysis of late 18th-century Italian epistolary novel through the emblematic case of Carlo Botta’s unfinished book Per questi dilettosi monti (1796), discovered and published for the first time by Luca Badini Confalonieri in 1986. Especially when compared to other literary experiments of the same period (such as Il sepolcro su la montagna by Giambattista Giovio, 1796), referring to the same ideological frame derived from Rousseau, Botta’s novel can be described as an original attempt to resume the contradictory discourse of La Nouvelle Héloïse about the irremediable contrast between nature and civilization, passion and reason. However, its incomplete form allows one to formulate only hypotheses concerning the results of a narrative interweaving built on a series of intertextual anticipations and allusions. From a structural point of view, it may be sustained that Botta’s book represents a further instance of the process leading to the transformation of the epistular genre in the peculiar form of writing of the self, which is distinctive of the novel during the Tournant des Lumières, under the great influence of Goethe’s Werther.