Precettistica ‘d’agreste rito’ in una lettera di Bartolomeo Lorenzi a Teodoro Ravignani

This essay presents the edition of a yet unpublished letter written by the famous Veronese poet Bartolomeo Lorenzi, author of the Eighteenth century didactic poem La coltivazione dei monti. The addressee of the letter is Teodoro Ravignani, a Veronese nobleman for whom Lorenzi worked as a preceptor. In the letter Lorenzi points out the possibility of devoting fields to pasture. Then Lorenzi explains how to prune a mulberry tree, a topic discussed in contemporary didactic poems, such as Il baco da seta (1756) written by Zaccaria Betti, or La coltivazione dei gelsi (1792) by Leonardo Miniscalchi, a translation of Mororum libri iii (1769) by Luigi Miniscalchi. In this letter Lorenzi adds some verses from an incomplete and lost Latin poem, Commentarium rusticum, patterned after Jacques Venière’s Praedium rusticum.