Zibaldone Pdf
Idara Viengxay
A zibaldone (plural zibaldoni) is an Italian vernacular commonplace book or notebook containing a wide variety of vernacular texts, copied into a small or medium-format paper codex[1] by citizens in late-medieval and Renaissance Italian city-states.
The word may also refer specifically to the book of philosophical reflections by the nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, the Zibaldone di pensieri often called simply The Zibaldone.
Romans kept notes of ideas, maxims, quotations and so forth, and called these collections locus communis. Emperor Marcus Aurelius himself kept one, and it became his Meditations. From the third century, the Chinese kept biji, which were similarly collections of notes. These ancient practices led, eventually to the Italian zibaldone, which were the basis for commonplace books and later, bullet journals.
Importantly, these books were written in the vernacular, meaning that they were for everyday use and not intended as formal documents (which would have been in Latin). In Florence, and other Italian cities, people kept ricordi (records), and libri segreti (secret, or private, books chiefly but not exclusively concerned with business information). In these books, people (almost always men) recorded business transactions, family births and deaths, observances of city life and political events technical information, indeed anything the author might want to refer to again later. Writers put these books together in no particular order, piling content in as and when it appeared. These books have provided highly important for historians. Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai, a fifteenth-century Florentine wool trader and statesman, was one of the most important keepers of a zibaldone. Not only does his book tell us about conducting business in the Renaissance, but it bears witness to the rise of the Medici and huge changes in civic government.
These Italian merchants brought their books to the foreign cities they traded with, and they caught on. By the eighteenth century, they were known in English-speaking countries as commonplace books, a translation of the Latin locis communis. Many notable people kept them: Thomas Jefferson, Jane Austen, H. P. Lovecraft and Napoleon, for example. A few have been published, like that of H. P. Lovecraft.
People filled their zibaldoni and commonplace books with all sorts of things: reflections on events, personal and political; recipes; business information; quotations; drawings and illustrations; letters; poems; reference tables, for example of weights and measures; proverbs and prayers.
Bullet journals, like zibaldoni and commonplace books are not diaries. They are not necessarily chronological, but they fulfil many of the functions of diaries. Like diaries, they work in two ways. They look both forwards (planned events and appointments) and backwards (when we record what actually happened). We keep track of our scheduled tasks and appointments in weekly or monthly spreads. We record things that happened without planning, in the form of general reflections or specific spreads. Gratitude logs are a popular way of marking things for which we were grateful each day. Historic zibaldoni and commonplace books tended to do much more reflection than planning, but the two are very much compatible. The bujo index helps out with locating information amid the hodgepodge.
I keep a journal on my laptop, but when we travel I take a little blank sketchbook & colored pencils to write brief notes & draw pictures to help me remember the highlights. Tuck in ticket stubs, etc. & it's sort of a stew. (Love the things I learn here!)
Giacomo Leopardi is considered one of the greatest Italian poets of the 19th century, perhaps the finest after Dante. He was also a voracious reader and scholar. For many years he kept an enormous notebook known as the Zibaldone (Harold Bloom called it a \u2018hodge-podge\u2019) for collecting his responses to what he read and experienced. A zibaldone is a dish with any old thing thrown in. A stew, a soup, a salmagundi.
Leopardi\u2019s 4500+ pages contain comments about anthropology, astronomy, history, language, literature, love, poetry, philosophy, and religion. It\u2019s a foundational book of modern culture, though it went unpublished until the 20th century. It was only fully translated into English 11 years ago, by the Leopardi Centre in Birmingham, England.
Of course, it\u2019s not the only zibaldone, though it was the only one termed that. Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s notebooks (a page from which is above) are very similar, as are uncountable sketchbooks with text, \u2018commonplace books\u2019, scrapbooks, illustrated journals, and so on. Here\u2019s someone keeping one fairly recently.
There\u2019s a great piece here about other zibaldone-keepers, though it descibes the form as analogue versions of a blog or Tumblr, which I think is unfair to zibaldoni. How about you, do you keep something similar? I tire of having possessions no longer in use but that are still kicking around and taking up space, so have given them up. But am working on memoirs in a zibaldone style \u2026 because they\u2019re collages, of course.
I discovered the zibaldone because I felt restricted by the other kind of notebooks I was keeping. The problem lay in the combination of two disciplines in one word. Because finally there was always too much of one or the other.
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