Giuseppe Antonio Costantini e il libro «libro di lettere» nella Venezia di metà Settecento
abstract
The ‘Book of Letters’ is a literary genre that had a large fortune in Italy and Europe in the XVIIIth Century. Particularly rich in this regard was the Venetian brand production, in which Giuseppe Antonio Costantini occupies a very important position all along the second half of the century: his volumes of ‘Critical Letters’ were explicitly viewed as a kind of behavioral handbook, founded more on the occurrences of practical life than on teaching of abstract moral theories. The education message (and the good practices linked to it) was communicated in the form of anthologies of ‘pseudo-letters’, that reached the readers by using the marketing strategies of the modern ‘Literary Market’.
Keywords: Books of Letters • Venice in eighteenth century