Goldoni e la Repubblica di Genova

Alberto Beniscelli’s paper examines the volume Carlo Goldoni. Carteggio consolare con la Repubblica di Genova, published in the National Edition of Goldoni’s works by Marsilio, 2021, and edited by Franco Paolo Oliveri and Giordano Rodda. This is an important contribution, conducted on the 108 dispatches regularly sent by the consul, residing in Venice, to the Genoese Senate during the period January 7, 1741 - March 16, 1743. Restored with philological care and supported by a broad historical-documentary apparatus, the epistolary material is offered as a chapter of the culture and history of the Italian eighteenth century. On one hand, it illuminates central aspects of Goldoni’s life, and some phases of the theatrical journey. On the other hand, it opens up new approaches to the social and political system of eighteenth century Genoa, with particular attention to the entrepreneurial-noble reality of protections and commissions. Secondly, some aspects of Goldoni’s narrative as a reporter are examined, especially highlighting the novelistic approach in the narration of cases and the literary consul’s mastery of war-torn Europe. Giordano Rodda’s paper turns to two episodes of Goldoni’s consular period, which undergo a significant evolution in his subsequent accounts of the events, both in his autobiographical writing (the prefaces to the Pasquali edition and the Mémoires) and in the plays, as in L’impostore of 1754. The first episode concerns the disappearance of the snuffboxes seized by the consul from Domenico Bologna, a debtor to the Genoese noble Domenico Sauli, and long missing until Goldoni was forced to admit his responsibility; the second is the affair of the so-called “Raguseo”, when Goldoni and his brother Gian Paolo were victims of a scam by a self-proclaimed captain from Ragusa. Both events left Goldoni, already without fixed emoluments for his position by the Genoese Senate, nearly destitute. The study of the dispatches and the newly recovered correspondence among the protagonists provide an illuminating example of Goldoni’s self-narrative strategy regarding an unhappy period of his career, when he sought to restore his reputation by alternating sincerity and dissimulation, remembrance and rehabilitation.