Sotto il segno del “naufragio”: la scrittura autobiografica di Pietro Giannone

Abstract

Pietro Giannone, imprisoned in the fortress of Miolans, between April 1736 and September of the following year, wrote the Vita, which remained forgotten until 1890. The autobiographical pages, with their amount of information, must beread together with the considerations collected in the Ape ingegnosa. Giannone, forced into narrow spaces and chased by slander, reconstructing his historia calamitatum,gives us a fundamental piece of the history of the autobiography, that handed down the image of the persecuted intellectual overwhelmed by History which –unlike the beloved Lucrezio –cannot watch from the shore the spectacle of the shipwreck.