Virgilio (invisibile) a Verona

59 students. 9 schools from Verona and its province, plus Mantua. One unusual challenge: to transcribe Virgil’s works from palimpsest manuscript no. XL of the Biblioteca Capitolare in Verona, using multispectral images produced by the Verona unit of the MSCA AntCom (P. Leontaridis, G. Marchioro, P. Scattolin, K. Tsakona).

This is the goal of Virgilio (invisibile) a Verona, the Citizen Science project the AntComs have been running since March, thus contributing fully to the Department’s Third Mission objectives. It will conclude on May 29 with an international seminar (Polo Zanotto, room T8, 14:00 - 18:30), where students will present their results alongside specialists in the exegetical tradition of Virgil (A. Boikou, A. Delvigo, A. Garcea). The students approach this demanding task after an introductory phase in which they attended sessions on philology (P. Scattolin), the Virgilian tradition (P. De Paolis), multispectral analysis (G. Marchioro), palaeography (I. Ferrari, V. Nicolis), and text encoding (S. Bazzaco).

Manuscript XL is not an easy object. Long understudied because of its fragile condition, it is a Late Antique palimpsest severely damaged in the 19th century by chemical reagents used to reveal its undertext. And what an undertext: not only Virgil, but also ancient scholia preserved in a set otherwise unattested. Recently, only Ludovico Geymonat, in his critical edition of Virgil (1973; 2nd ed. 2008), attempted to read the poetic text, using tools incomparable to those available today.
How accurate was his collation? What can these damaged Veronese parchments still tell us about the transmission of Virgil in Late Antiquity? To answer these questions, every week, for two intensive hours, a group of young people experience scientific research first-hand as a challenging, exciting and practical endeavour.

https://univr.zoom.us/j/88363725781