Frusta letteraria (magazine)

Frusta letteraria (The literary whip) was a fortnightly periodical founded in Venice in 1763, directed and written almost entirely by Giuseppe Baretti, under the pseudonym of Aristarchus Scannabue.

[1][2][3] Published between 1763 and 1765, the magazine obtained a great success, especially for the polemical shots and the bright tones with which Baretti expressed his opinions towards numerous writers, his contemporaries or the past.

Baretti decided to sign the magazine under the pseudonym of Aristarco Scannabue, a character of his invention, to whom he dedicated a lively description in the introductory part.

Numerous citizens, resentful of the criticisms made by Baretti against Pietro Bembo, a sixteenth-century poet, beloved by the Venetians, asked the Reformers to cease publication of the magazine.

From then on, all the remaining eight issues of the magazine, from 19 April to 15 July 1765, were dedicated to the impetuous criticism against his father Appiano Buonafede, who a few months earlier had published a work, full of rancor against the Baretti, titled Novelle Menippe by Luciano Firenzuola against a certain pseudepigraphic Frusta by Aristarco Scannabue.