Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti probably represents the most famous case study for the ‘filologia d’autore’ (‘authorial philology’) which is a fundamental branch of textual scholarship applied to autograph elaborative material of a given work. Indeed, from the late Twenties to 2006, four critical editions of Leopardi’s poetry collection have been published in Italy, each one adopting different techniques and layouts . In this regard, we can state that the Canti is a test work for filologia d’autore, and that the latest edition, provided by Franco Gavazzeni, can be considered as a textbook example for this kind of approach . Since Leopardi’s manuscripts have been successfully exploited in great detail, we have asked ourselves whether a digital approach could provide a more effective representation of this corpus. It seemed to us, indeed, that the possibility of working on a matter which was already studied from a scholarly perspective would facilitate our task, as we could concentrate more easily on technical aspects, such as the encoding and displaying of information. This heritage (namely, all the scholarly annotations and elucidations elaborated over a century of intense research and studies) faced us to the need of shaping a digital prototype for an edition of filologia d'autore, taking in account not only the physical layer of manuscripts but, above all, the diachronic evolution of the author's thinking and writing. To better understand what are the main issues (and challenges) of a digital edition of Leopardi's Canti, we need to get back to manuscripts.