"Quelle note che gli stampatori domandan rampini". Su una scelta lessicale ed esegetica di Alessandro Piccolomini

The present paper analyses a little known episode in the history of the Italian punctuation. It fo- cuses on a precise moment of the lexical and semantic case of the word rampino – the typographic sign of the square bracket –, corresponding to its emergence in a passage of Alessandro Piccolomini (1572). In particular, the paper examines the meaning and the function of such a sign all along the exegetical apparatus set up by Piccolomini in his translation of, and commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics. Furthermore, it examines in a diachronic perspective other forms within the same semantic field as rampino, and establishes focused comparisons with French and English linguistic domains. By this way, the paper bears witness to such a peculiar subset of the 16th century typography, and place the particular circumstance of the word rampino in the wider context of the technical vocabulary of printing, considered in its historical process.