14 Epistola della peste. Edizione critica secondo il ms. Banco rari 29

In May 1523 Machiavelli sent to his friend Lorenzo Strozzi, who was absent from Florence at the time, an account of the city overwhelmed by the plague. After Machiavelli’s death, Strozzi  took the authorship of the work upon himself by tampering with the original autograph, which is why since the late nineteenth century up to the present the work has been considered to be by Strozzi. A wide-ranging historic, philological and critical investigation has now restored the paternity of the work to the author of The Prince. This study has also cast light on the extraordinary literary interest of a topic such as the plague, which since antiquity has been adopted by writers as an emblem of tragedy. On the contrary Machiavelli, at times parodying Boccaccio, offers a comic-grotesque representation of plague-beset Florence with such original results as to make this epistolary account a little masterpiece of its kind. At the same time it brings to the fore an interesting and hitherto unknown chapter in the literary culture of the Florentine Renaissance.