Il bastone miracoloso (The Miraculous Staff) by Lorenzo Pignotti

Il bastone miracoloso (The Miraculous Staff) is a poemetto burlesco—a satirical narrative poem written in octaves (ottava rima)—by Lorenzo Pignotti. The standard description found in Wikipedia and academic sources notes: «Uscì postumo, nel 1831, il suo poemetto burlesco Il bastone miracoloso che narra la storia di un uomo dotto abissino che smaschera i ciarlatani». Published posthumously in 1831 (with a Dublin imprint, though actually printed in Florence), the work tells the story of a learned Abyssinian scholar who uses a "miraculous" staff to unmask impostors, charlatans, and frauds.

The text maintains an ironic and critical tone characteristic of the author's most satirical side, distinct from his more widely known fables. While in his Favole e Novelle he attacked human vices through irony, in Il bastone miracoloso he continues along the same lines, focusing specifically on intellectual hypocrisy and charlatanism. Alongside La treccia donata, it was praised in its time as one of his most agreeable and pleasant verse compositions, even though it contains sharp wit and period-specific personal references that are less easily understood today.

I’ve been writing several blog entries about this text. The issue was that I couldn't find a Spanish translation of the work. It is a rather unusual and hard-to-trace text. It doesn't appear fully digitized and accessible on Google Books or on easily searchable Italian public domain sites. It is only mentioned in biographies and catalogs of Pignotti's works (Italian Wikipedia, Treccani, etc.), but the complete text isn't available. Either my search was insufficient, or there really are no digitized translations published on web platforms.

However, there is an Italian version uploaded to Archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_JOBFm18SyJQC/mode/2up

So, what I did was use the help of an AI—in this case, Grok, although all AIs have OCR capabilities that allow them to read and translate text from an image. I was originally planning to convert the result into a PDF, but the AI solved that for me by generating a clean PDF directly. Finally, I uploaded it to Archive.org so that it remains available for anyone interested in reading these unusual texts.

https://archive.org/details/pignotti-lorenzo-el-baston-milagroso-en-espanol/page/n15/mode/2up