“L’Aristotelismo Lombardo, questo sconosciuto”

The essay offers a follow up of the first A.’s scholarly work about Aristotelians – and the anti-Aristotelians – in the sixteenth century Lombardy. While it is a notable fact that in Paris, Padua, Florence, in Paris, Aristotle was read in Greek in the 15th and 16th century, – and it is debated whether it happened even earlier in Padua, as Schmitt believes, or in Florence, as L. Bianchi believes – Aristotelianism in Lombardt is conspicuously missing in scholarly debates about these themes. Yet, Aristotelians where certainly reading Aristotle in Greek during the 16th c. in Lombardy: documents here at issue – most remarkably, annotated early printed edition of Aristotle and of the commentators – witness this fact. As significant case studies we take here Greek to Aristotle, to Alexander of Aphrodisias and to other commentators of Aristotle in printed volumes held in Milano by Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense and by Biblioteca Ambrosiana. The Braidense manuscript notes in Greek and Latin to Alexander's Quaestiones were discovered a the end of the 20th c. They are now recognized to e by Ottaviano Ferrari. Remarkably enough, these notes can be shown to excel the Florentine ones, which are attributed to Pier Vettori, and introduced as such in the critical apparatus of the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, Berlin 1889-1892. Our Lombard notes are in fact more copious and more intensely linked to an ongoing theoretical reflection. They need to be taken into account for a future critical edition. Our research has identified Cesare Rovida as a hand at work in the margins of some editiones principes , and as the author (which is an apparently eminent and isolated case) of a succinct commentary in Greek to the Greek text of the Physics, of which Marco Ghione firstly publishes an extract here.