Tullio De Mauro e il Lessico intellettuale europeo

This essay explores some aspects of the collaboration between Tullio Gregory and Tullio De Mauro in the early years of the "European intellectual lexicon" project. Unfortunately, so far no documents have emerged from the private archives of the two scholars to help reconstruct its elaboration. However, it is legitimate to go back along the biographies of De Mauro and Gregory and seek in their scientific training, in the research work actually carried out, the ideas that at a certain point could mature in the form of a project of such great ambitions and, for the time, not only methodologically, but also technologically innovative. The prehistory of the concept of "intellectual vocabulary" in some key thinkers of the European tradition is the background for the investigation whose results are presented here.