Volucres is a Latin elegy composed in old age by Alessandro Manzoni and published in the newspaper «La Perseveranza » in 1868. Apart from the editio princeps, the text was hitherto known from two drafts. This article publishes a new witness of the poem, handwritten by Manzoni. The document has been found in Naples in the archive of Ruggiero Bonghi, director of the newspaper where the poem appeared for the first time. After a brief description of this archive and of its importance for Manzonian scholarship, the differences between the new manuscript and other versions of the text are analysed.