How are the great classics of Italian literature written? This theme will be explored at a public exhibition in Rome, which will be open until April 25. The exhibition, "How Classics Are Born: The Autographs of Italian Literature", is held in Villa Farnesina (the home of the Accademia dei Lincei). The exhibition invites visitors to move beyond the idea of literary masterpieces as “fixed and perfect” and instead discover their uncertain and provisional beginnings. It will also provide an opportunity to study a method of producing literature that, in the digital age, is doomed to disappear. The exhibition, developed in collaboration with prominent Italian and international lending institutions, showcases remarkable artifacts: from the manuscript on which Boccaccio transcribed his Decameron to the pages on which Ariosto authored the concluding cantos of Orlando Furioso; from the notebook in which Leopardi composed his Operette morali to the pocket-sized notebook in which Montale inscribed, with a pen, "Ho sceso, dandoti il braccio, almeno un milione di scale", ("I descended, with you on my arm, at least a million stairs").