| This thesis, presenting a critical commentary on a text in Greek, still scarcely known also to the specialists, composed by one of the pivotal figures of the Italian Renaissance and Court literature, Cardinal Pietro Bembo, aims to analyze and contextualize the phenomenon of the classical languages in 15th-16th, in the light of the massive socio-cultural phenomenon of the Greek scholars emigration to the Western world, above all Italy, after the Fall of Constantinople (1453). Organized around four chapters and an Appendix, dedicated this last one to the first Italian translation of the Oration in favour of the Greek Letters, the research moves from a socio-historical and literary reconstruction of the literary production of the Greek emigres. Considering the widest possible range of sources, textual as well as paratextual (notes in the margins, letters, dedications, early prints, incunabula), chapters II-IV, focuse on specific personalities such as Pietro Bembo and Costantino Lascaris, his first teacher of Greek in Sicily.;I argue that the reconstruction of the young years of the famous noble Venetian Bembo is an unique occasion to closely inspect ways and techniques of a Renaissance pupil and his famous Byzantine teacher, but also the possibility to reconstruct in fieri the 'personality' of a Greek scholar, through a close inspection of Bembo's early letters and, above all, at the mirror of his first book (De Aetna), printed by one of most important press of the Renaissance: Aldus Manutius. |
