Il percorso di un pensiero: Pascal in Italia. Prime traduzioni ed edizioni delle Lettres Provinciales tra XVII e XVIII secolo

The genealogy of the Italian translations of Pascal’s works – both in manuscript and print – and of his Lettres Provinciales in particular is still an unexplored research field. An Italian translation of the Provinciales was published in 1684 in a four-language edition. The volume contained the French original text, the Latin version by Pierre Nicole, the Spanish version, and the Italian one, translated by Cosimo Brunetti. In 1659, in Paris, he started the Italian translation of the Lettres, which was published in the multilingual volume almost twenty years later. In the Library of Genoa University there is a manuscript dating back to the XVII century (A. v. 16), that contains an Italian translation of the Lettres Provinciales which is significantly different from Brunetti’s version. Therefore, not only does the present study focus on an obscure codex, it also strongly argues that such a text is the first Italian translation, which can be considered independent from Brunetti’s manuscript.