As is well known, few of Pirandello's works have survived in manuscript form (or even in typescript with autograph corrections). Given the rarity and value of these documents in terms of the gestation of the works, we have chosen to treat them philologically separately from the printed texts.
This means having the opportunity for ‘direct’ contact with the Agrigento author's autographs. Users can thus observe the layers, the movements of the writing, the hesitations, and the radical rethinking that affect the work at different levels, from small lexical details to larger textual sequences.
Our decision, as opposed to a mere digital reproduction of the manuscript, was to offer a transcription that accompanies each page of the autograph in a synoptic manner. The novelty of this transcription is that it gives an account of the ‘history’ of the manuscript in a diplomatic way, i.e., through a mode of representation that scrupulously reports all the deletions, corrections, and additions of text that make some of Pirandello's manuscripts a veritable author's workshop.
