Accademia degli Incompresi

A Daring Archive on the Verge Between Speculation and Fact

The Italian Academies in the 16th and 17th centuries were fundamental cultural spaces of resistance, transgression and experimentation for generations of like-minded intellectuals and artists. This group of men and women created a utopian republic of letters—detached from the brutalities and injustices of contemporary society—where controversial and heterodox ideas could freely circulate.

While the concept of a fictional academy is not novel—as evidenced by several historical examples of academiae fictivae such as Anton Francesco Doni’s Accademia dei Pellegrini— the Accademia degli Incompresi pushes it further, transcending the physical boundaries of space and time, fiction and fact, in order to advocate for the daring poems of this speculative intellectual network through imaginary polyphony that never was—but perhaps ought to have.

Exploring the Knowledge Base

Accademia degli Incompresi is a open-source knowledge base for scholars and artistic interested in the intellectual and artistic network of Italian academies, and their heterodoxic and transgressive thought.

We have recorderd metadata on agents, publications, poems and music compositions, including assets in the form of digital images, transcribed music in MEI format and textual transciptions of poems. Each entity's information has been serialized in JSON, CSV and RDF Turtle formats and is available on a dedicated GitHub repository.

The whole platform has been developed via the KBLight Python package available on PyPi.