Paolo Bufalini and the classics: towards a digital edition of his “Note-Book”

Abstract

The paper presents some projects related to Paolo Bufalini, who was an eminent politician and antifascist, and his interest in the classics. A note-book of his annotations from Latin and modern authors written between 1981 and 1991 is examined. Bufalini often linked these authors to current events, or to considerations concerning phenomena of an existential or political nature. As tge Note-book is full of his corrections, notes and translations, it is an interesting document about the life of a leading intellectual in post-war Italy. As a result the paper examines how to produce a digital edition based on XML (Extensible Markup Language); this included firstly, the encoding of all the textual, informative and structural elements of the text (adopting the TEI lite scheme), and secondly the graphic representation of the encoded elements (quotations, annotations, corrections, underlining etc.) on the final page, viewable by the user through an internet browser. We also present two further projects: a new printed edition of the Horatian translations by Bufalini, and an online catalogue of Bufalini’s manuscripts on Horace which can be found at the Study Centre “La Permanenza del Classico”.