Scuola, accademia, eloquenza. Luigi Maria Rezzi e i suoi rapporti epistolari nella Roma dell’Ottocento

Abstract

Nineteenth-century Rome, far from being exclusively conditioned by censorship and ecclesiastical moralism, presented itself as a lively cultural theatre, a place where schools, universities, academies, cafés and private circles proliferated. By examining the activities of a teacher and scholar such as Luigi Maria Rezzi (1785-1857), who attended and influenced many of the aforementioned places of erudition, we also analyse the memoirs and epistles left by the circle of young Romans that constituted his school. Those same young people would, for the most part, flow into the literary elite, of the city and beyond, of the 19th century and the first part of the following one. Through the letters written and received by the teacher, the analysis of the links and the multiple roles he held, we can thus reconstruct a dense network of relationships, a set of biographical data that allow us to add new elements to the picture of the papal Rome of those years.