All’ombra della grammatica: una silloge poetica quasi ignota e un ‘nuovo’ autore (ms. Macerata, Biblioteca Comunale “Mozzi-Borgetti”, 662)

This paper focuses on the corpus of twenty three Latin poems held in the ms. Macerata, Biblioteca Comunale “Mozzi Borgetti”, 662, copied in 1481 by a certain Giovan Pietro di ser Gabriele from Cingoli (according to the subscription) and to be surely considered as a school book. It is one of the few surviving manuscript witnesses of the Artis grammatice opusculum arranged by Bartolomeo Filalite, pupil of Lorenzo Valla. The carmina (ff. 54r-63r) - adespoti, anepigraphic and never studied so far - are interesting for their recipients, content and structure. The essay sheds new light on their author, on their addressees (including important personalities such as the cardinal Raffaele Riario) and offers assessments of their contents; actually, although the text is strongly compromised by errors (linguistic, syntactic and metrical), it gives relevant information, in particular about the relationship between the author and Pomponio Leto. Such considerations allow us to reconstruct an interesting piece of the network system of the Italian Humanism; but also they allow us to follow the development of Latin poetry in the second half of the Quattrocento, which became a practised and practicable 'language' on a wide scale: a clear sign of the functioning and quality of the educational system.