Studi Veronesi (Jul 2024)
Gaetano Trezza between Verona and Florence. Cultural memory and intellectual parable of a literary-philosopher
Abstract
After an initial investigation on the presence of Gaetano Trezza (1827-1892) in local and national public memory (city odonomastics, epigraphy, iconography, etc.), the essay retraces the life of the defrocked Veronese priest and apostle of positivism, correlating it with his opera. Then some lines and aspects of Trezzi’s critical and historiographical thought are discussed: anti-medievalism, which can be included in his theory of “historical intermittences”; the conception of literary historiography as a “historical morphology” shaped by Darwinian selection; the comparative method as an antidote to eruditism and philologism; “realism”. Aspects and interests that led Benedetto Croce to call him a “genius” and a “soul” that was not “common”, despite the oblivion that quickly fell on his work following the anti-positivist reaction of the early twentieth century. In the Appendix, a bibliographical review of the secondary literature relating to Gaetano Trezza lists all the known contributions published from 1862 to today.
