The volume is part of a series published by Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, devoted to the reprinting of every book edited by the renowned liberal antifascist Pietro Gobetti (1901–1926), which are now extremely difficult to find on the book market. The aim of the series is to protect and promote Gobetti's editorial work and to transmit it to new generations.

This volume contains an anastatic printing of Pietro Mignosi's L'eredità dell'Ottocento (The Heritage of the Nineteenth Century, 1925) with an afterword by Rosanna Marsala and Pierangelo Gentile and a short biography of the author. Piero Mignosi, a Sicilian Catholic thinker, poet and critic, chose to publish most of his essays with Gobetti in an attempt to escape his provincial environment. His initially problematic, then cordial relationship with Gobetti is documented by the letters they exchanged, still unpublished, which are quoted in the afterword.

L'eredità dell'Ottocento opens with an introduction (initially conceived as a separate essay) attempting to trace the origins of Italian Romanticism in the eighteenth century, particularly as regards the question of imagination, as theorised by Giambattista Vico and Gian Vincenzo Gravina. While postulating Vico as a forerunner of Romanticism was not a particularly original stance at the time, Gravina was rarely included in the discussion. In the ensuing chapters, Mignosi identifies Giosuè Carducci as the chronological limit of Italian Romanticism and as the founder of a truly spiritual poetry – capable of generating ‘una realtà unitaria di sensibilità e di coscienza’ (p. 31) – which counterbalances the indecisive and unoriginal Christianism of Manzoni (in this sense, he interprets Carducci as anti-Manzoni). Obsessed with the spiritual values of literature, Mignosi then argues that all nineteenth-century Italian ‘laical’ (areligiosa) literature has a concealed leaning towards the divine, but is incapable of transforming its sentimental dimension into a fully religious one. Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele d'Annunzio's works can therefore be read as misunderstandings (equivoci) – sterile literary experiments that do not solve the problem of the sentimental and leave their promises unfulfilled. Mignosi identifies a ‘mystical’ trend in some modern thinkers like Croce and Papini. He seems to find a good example of modern epic writing in the work of Giovanni Verga, praised for ‘correcting Manzoni’ (p. 56). Towards the end, Mignosi indicates a return to Leopardi as the most promising direction for modern Italian literature.

The essay, though useful as an insight into (shyly) antifascist culture and the canonisation of nineteenth-century authors such as Leopardi and Manzoni – a topic of the utmost interest, given that the Fascist regime appropriated their legacy – is very difficult to read: as Rosanna Marsala explains, Mignosi's main points on art and literature would become clearer in his later works (p. 125). An annotated edition would have made this essay more accessible.