Una sera d'inverno in un interno: senso comune, grazia e misura nella Civil conversazione di Stefano Guazzo

The Civil conversation by Stefano Guazzo is a treatise in dialogical form divided into four books, published in Brescia in 1574. Eccentric, usable, modern and very current - despite the intrinsic and extrinsic re-proposition of every more rigid norm of the Classicism of the Ancient Regime - this book today still has a lot to say about the vexata question of the Italian crisis in the Modern Age, placing, with great argumentative efficacy, the problem of the importance of conversation understood as a constituent form of the whole society, an investment capable of producing honor and profit, warning against the risk of being excluded from social exchange for those who refuse to acquire its grammar. The topic of the treatise is of extreme importance: conversation for the first time in vulgar culture is the reasoning of an entire work, although in the Italy of the Ancient Regime there is no conversation, and there is no practice understood as a common way to guarantee the social identity of each one, and to ensure the very practicability of interpersonal exchange. To this social structure, therefore, Guazzo proposes his conversation, accessible to all, endowed with grace, however accessory, and grace, however procured, and for this reason able to become the emblem of a whole society, and to connote its culture. and communicative practices, both oral and written.