Promise of payment by Alberto Pratoneri for Correggio's painting Adoration of the Shepherds (The Night) and receipt from the painter, 14 October 1522, imitative copy Autografoteca Campori, fasc. "(The) Correggio (Allegri, Antonio)", c. 3r

The client, Alberto Pratoneri, undertakes to pay 208 Reggian lire for a painting on the nativity, according to the design agreed with the artist, who certifies that he received a deposit of 40 lire on the same day. It should be noted that Correggio uses the Latinized form of his surname (Allegro> Laetus> Lieto) in the signature, according to a custom that had been following for about a decade.

The provenance of the autographs is not always very clear. Indeed, it is not uncommon for collectors to obtain documents stolen from archives and libraries, often with the complicity of their custodians. Something like this seems to have happened to Alessandro Tassoni's autograph that Cesare Campori sent to Cittadella on behalf of his brother Giuseppe Campori: the document was probably stolen from the Capitular Archive of Modena and Giuseppe preferred not to sign "the written declaration behind the autograph, for the sake of convenience, knowing where this card comes from ».

Leopardi does not hide his intolerance for the environment of Recanati, "this miserable village", isolated and provincial, from where it is difficult even to get in touch with "quite distant places". Just this impatience will push the poet in a few months to try to escape to Lombardy-Veneto, but his plan will be thwarted by his father's intervention. In the meantime, he sent Brighenti a copy of his "poor songs", Sull'Italia and Sul monument di Dante, which is being prepared in Florence, published the year before in Rome and dedicated to Vincenzo Monti.

The dispatch is written aboard a galley in a very delicate moment of the failed expedition against Algiers, one of the Barbary strongholds, in which Charles V himself participates. Due to a violent storm that destroyed part of the fleet, the land army, of which Ferrante is one of the commanders, had to retreat with heavy losses, and on 2 November the difficult re-embarkation operations were concluded. The emperor then orders Ferrante to send the remaining infantry partly to Lombardy and partly to Sardinia.

The recipient of the letter is a Milanese theatrical impresario, longtime friend of Rossini. On the occasion of his daughter's wedding, the composer sends him this small epistolary divertissement, with which he expresses affectionate wishes to the married couple. However, the letter is also a kind of wedding gift, given the value that undoubtedly had a personalized autograph of a celebrity like Rossini.