Enciclopedie dell'infamia. Note su "Vite di uomini non illustri"

This article examines "Vite di uomini non illustri" (1993) by Giuseppe Pontiggia, situating it within the broad and multifaceted tradition of life narratives. The first part compares Pontiggia’s work with seminal texts such as Marcel Schwob’s "Imaginary Lives", alongside works focused on the lives of the infamous and the forgotten, including Pierre Michon’s "Small Lives", Danilo Kiš’s "A Tomb for Boris Davidovich", and Michel Foucault’s unfinished project outlined in "The Life of Infamous Men", to identify shared themes and significant divergences. The second part focuses on the distinctive narrative strategies adopted by Pontiggia. Adopting a transdisciplinary approach – particularly through a comparison with microhistory, which, like Pontiggia, inherits key elements from the Manzonian tradition – the analysis explores how the collection represents the “invisible history” of the unremarkable in relation to the grand narrative of History with a capital H.