Il "Cinque Maggio" di Pietro Custodi

Recently Vittorio Criscuolo re-proposed a series of manuscripts by Pietro Custodi, rechecked through the autographs of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and this brings to our attention a peculiar, unpublished ode on the death of Napoleon. Certainly Custodi was not a good poet, and his very originality is called into question if punctually compared with Manzoni’s Fifth of May (Il cinque maggio), as it is clear that this latest was his actual source of inspiration. Indeed, it has been ascertained that, starting in the summer of 1821, Manzoni himself circulated numerous manuscript copies of his ode, in order to circumvent censorship, and thus it should not have been difficult for Custodi to have access to a text that depended on those copies. However, Custodi – unlike Manzoni, who left the judgement on the emperor “to posterity” – in his ode does not avoid blaming the man who had held the fate of the world in his hands for years, and reproaches him for having deceived the peoples who had at first considered him as a liberator, while he was aiming only
at the affirmation of his own personal power.