Lodovico Nocentini: A Rereader of modern Italian travellers to China

In 1882 Nocentini published the historical monograph : Il primo sinologo : P. Matteo Ricci. This is the first secular biography of the famous Italian Jesuit to China published for the Italian readership. Nowadays Nocentini’s work on Ricci has little scientific value, but at the time it posed important questions about the origins of sinology in Italy and in Europe, as well as the role of Matteo Ricci and the contribution of modern Italian travellers to Sino-Western relations. It also provides a useful insight into the perception of Italian sinology as a discipline with great potential, only if Italy and its institutions could prove that it was founded by Matteo Ricci.
Il primo sinologo : P. Matteo Ricci is examined through theories proposed by Derrida, Barthes, and Nabokov to understand Nocentini’s rereading of Matteo Ricci and travel literature in Italy in the late nineteenth century. For Nabokov a good reader was a rereader; Derrida instead intended rereading as a four steps process made of reinterpretation, new interpretation, appropriation and new perspective, while Barthes using a semiotic approach considered rereading a decoding process. Even so, all these theories provide contextualising features to appreciate the legacy of Ricci to the formation of sinology as a field of study and to successive generations of sinologists.