About Paves-e
Meaning
and Vision
Some authors are bound to their time, their legacy fading with their era. Others—rare and enduring—gain strength over time, stretching their influence well beyond the limits of their historical moment and initial readership. These are the writers we call classics.
Year after year, Cesare Pavese seems increasingly to belong to this noble lineage, thanks to the enduring affection and recognition of his readers—especially younger generations—who continue to seek and find meaning in his voice.
The
Hyper-edition
Model
We chose to begin our journey with Pavese’s first published book: Lavorare stanca, a collection of poems released in 1936 by the Solaria press. This book marks a pivotal moment in Pavese’s development as a writer. With it, he found his voice—one that introduced a fresh poetic idiom to both the Italian and European literary scenes.
This volume bridges centuries of literary tradition with the bold innovation of American literature, invoking figures like Whitman and Edgar Lee Masters. The result is a poetic and cultural milestone born of sustained creative effort—visible in Pavese’s heavily revised manuscripts, letters, and diary notes, as well as in the arrival at a new, disorienting lexicon.
Our digital scholarly edition follows a model originally developed for the pirandellonazionale project, later refined through the Verismo Digitale initiative (part of the PNRR-CHANGES programme, Spoke 3, under the direction of Marina Paino), and integrated with the CHROMA model, as defined by the research group at CNR ISTC. This editorial framework, previously tested in Bellini Digital Correspondence (edited by Angelo Mario Del Grosso and Daria Spampinato), treats the text as a complex, multidimensional object, reflecting the intricacies of modern digital philology.
The Research Units
The PAVES-e project exists because it makes sense to bring a classic author into the digital age — not as a concession to current trends,
but as a way to let that voice speak again, differently, to everyone.
UNICT (Principal Investigator: Antonio Sichera)
To achieve this goal, diverse strengths and competencies were needed. The project began in Catania, where scholarly interest in Pavese has deep roots. It is no coincidence that the Principal Investigator of PAVES-e is Antonio Sichera. Twenty-five years separate the Concordanza delle poesie di Pavese (compiled by G. Savoca and A. Sichera, Olschki, 1997) from the recent Mondadori editions of Pavese’s major works—from the novels and Dialoghi con Leucò, to the monumental Opera poetica (2021), which for the first time brings together all his published and unpublished poems, as well as the full versions of his poetic translations from ancient and modern literatures. In between, two significant scholarly editions were published: Lavorare stanca edited by Liborio Pietro Barbarino (La Scuola di Pitagora, 2020) and La luna e i falò by Miryam Grasso (La Scuola di Pitagora, 2020), both emerging from major doctoral research efforts. Add to this the archival work of Christian D’Agata, bibliographical studies by Eliana Vitale, document retrieval by Maria Concetta Trovato, and the focus on Pavese as a classicist curated by Giuseppe Palazzolo. Together, this work has laid the foundations for a large-scale scholarly initiative led by the young researchers of CINUM (Centro di Informatica Umanistica at the University of Catania), coordinated by Antonio Sichera with Antonio Di Silvestro. This team also carried out the ambitious digital edition of Luigi Pirandello’s complete works, part of Italy’s National Scholarly Edition programme, supported by Mondadori and directed by Sichera and Di Silvestro. That same editorial collaboration now extends to PAVES-e, and we are proud and grateful to continue along this path.
UNITO (Scientific Coordinator: Laura Nay)
Catania’s counterpart in this endeavor could only be Turin. The long-standing collaboration between UNICT and UNITO traces back to the intellectual and personal bond between Marziano Guglielminetti and Giuseppe Savoca. It was under Guglielminetti’s mentorship at the University of Turin that a distinguished school of Pavese scholars emerged. Their work includes the critical edition of Il mestiere di vivere (Nay-Guglielminetti, 1990), the editorial work on Pavese’s novels and short stories for Einaudi (Guglielminetti-Masoero, 2000–2002), and the creation of a dedicated archival space for Pavese’s papers. Since 1984, manuscripts from both the Sini-Cossa family (Pavese’s heirs) and Einaudi have been preserved at the Centro Studi Gozzano-Pavese, currently directed by Laura Nay, which also houses a major portion of Pavese’s personal library. This context made the collaboration between Catania and Turin not only natural but essential. The younger scholars of CINUM now work in synergy with a new generation of Turin-based researchers under Laura Nay’s leadership. Nay, along with Clara Allasia and Chiara Tavella, has overseen new editions of Pavese’s work and coordinates a dynamic group of scholars including Lorenzo Resio, Luca Calcagno, Alberto Zuliani, and Saverio Vita. This reflects a broader truth: that major scholarly endeavors today rely on passionate, intergenerational teams brought together by shared cultural values and genuine human connections.
CNR ISTC (Scientific Coordinator: Daria Spampinato)
Transferring literature from the printed page to the digital realm—and creating digital approaches to philology, criticism, and teaching—requires solid, high-level expertise. Within PAVES-e, this expertise is provided by the CHROMA research group at the CNR ISTC (Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies), led by Daria Spampinato and supported by leading experts such as Angelo Mario Del Grosso. CHROMA’s collaboration with CINUM, forged through the Italian Association for Digital Humanities (AIUCD), has already borne fruit in projects such as EPICUM, Bellini Digital Correspondence, and the ongoing COVerLeSS (Online Corpus of Verismo between Literature, History, and Society – PRIN2022 PNRR). This same team—Salvatore Cristofaro, Laura Mazzagufo, Pierpaolo Sichera, Giovanni Gafà, Giuseppe Arena—has now created a novel digital environment tailored to Pavese, fully aligned with international scholarly standards.
Workflow
To bring a complex project to life, what is needed is strict organization, a clear division of tasks, and broad, ongoing collaboration.
The Archive
At the heart of the PAVES-e project lies the construction of a new digital archive. Starting from Pavese’s published texts, PAVES-e aims to incorporate and systematize a vast range of materials: manuscripts, letters, notes, drafts, critical writings, paratexts, and translations.
This digital archive is not merely a repository, but a dynamic and interconnected space. It allows readers and scholars to trace the evolution of Pavese’s work, explore thematic and lexical networks, and access materials through multiple pathways—by chronology, genre, topic, or source. Above all, it enables readers to experience the work in progress of a writer whose creative process was itself a profound act of self-translation.
Letters,
Mestiere di vivere,
Essays
An important section of the digital archive is dedicated to Pavese’s letters and essays—texts that are essential to understanding both his intellectual development and the cultural climate of his time. These writings reveal a thinker in dialogue with the major currents of 20th-century European and American culture, as well as a translator and editor constantly grappling with questions of language, identity, and style.
The project team is working to digitize, transcribe, and annotate this corpus, enabling cross-referencing with Pavese’s fictional and poetic works, and highlighting correspondences, quotations, and ideological shifts. The letters, in particular, open a privileged window into Pavese’s literary workshop and his private reflections, thus becoming a critical component of any in-depth hermeneutics of his oeuvre.
Lavorare stanca.
Lexicography
Language is the cornerstone of Pavese’s literary identity. His idiosyncratic use of Italian—rooted in Piedmontese dialect, shaped by classical studies, and influenced by Anglo-American models—deserves close and systematic analysis. The PAVES-e project has therefore developed a lexicographic tool capable of mapping, indexing, and interpreting Pavese’s vocabulary across his entire output.
This tool will allow users to search and visualize word usage by frequency, context, semantic field, and textual function. It will also help identify recurring motifs, metaphors, and symbolic patterns—contributing to a deeper understanding of Pavese’s poetics and worldview.
Encoding
Encoding is the beating heart of PAVES-e. Every text in the archive is marked up using TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) guidelines, the international standard for digital scholarly editions. But the annotation does not stop at structure or layout. It extends to names, places, references, intertexts, translation choices, stylistic features, and more.
Each annotation is the result of rigorous philological work and opens up interpretive pathways: what seems like a simple proper name may in fact reveal an intertextual network; a grammatical choice may signal a cultural shift; a minor variant may lead to a major rethinking of the text. Through annotation, PAVES-e not only documents but reactivates Pavese’s texts, enabling new readings and research.
The Ontology
Behind the scenes, a complex ontological model governs the relationships between the various entities in the archive: authors, works, events, places, concepts, and so on. Built on the foundations of semantic web technologies and cultural heritage standards, the OntoPavese ontology, developed within the framework of the PAVES-e project, ensures that every piece of information is not only stored, but made meaningful and machine-readable.
This allows for advanced querying, data visualization, and integration with external databases (e.g., Wikidata, VIAF, GeoNames). It also guarantees the long-term interoperability of the project with other digital resources in literary studies, cultural history, and computational philology.
The Digital Edition
The ultimate expression of the PAVES-e project is its digital edition of Pavese’s works. This edition is not merely a reproduction of printed texts, but a new editorial model: open, dynamic, interconnected. It combines rigorous philology with digital innovation, offering readers an experience that is at once scholarly and accessible.
Users can explore different versions of a text, access annotations and contextual materials, navigate thematic pathways, and generate personalized reading maps. For scholars, it is a tool for deep analysis; for teachers, a didactic resource; for the general public, a chance to rediscover Pavese with fresh eyes.
This edition grows over time—it will be continuously updated with new texts, new data, and new functionalities. Pavese becomes, in this way, not a closed canon, but an open system.
The publisher: OSCAR MONDADORI
All of this is made possible thanks to the collaboration with Mondadori Editore, which has supported the project since its inception. Through a dedicated agreement with the research units involved, Mondadori has made its editorial archive available, authorized digital use of the texts, and actively contributed to the development of the digital edition.
This partnership marks a historic shift: for the first time, an Italian publisher of this scale is participating directly in the construction of a digital scholarly platform.
We believe this model could inspire future collaborations between academia and publishing—opening up new paths for the transmission, accessibility, and renewal of literary heritage.
