«È giunto vicino al segreto degli Elleni» Il Nietzsche umanista di Giorgio Colli

My paper aims to inspect the conception of culture, and in particular the conception of philology and classical literature, in the young Nietzsche's thought (1869-1875). Starting from the radical distancing from the method and purpose of the 19th-century classical philology, the questions are: from what kind of cognitive-practical impulse the study of the ancients derives for Nietzsche; what the salient features of the Nietzschean method are; what the proper function of a renewed way of looking at the Greeks is. Some ideas are proposed relating to the affinity of Nietzsche's vision with Leopardi's (regarding the criticism of the study method of the past widespread in the 19th century; and the distinction between scientific and humanistic studies) and Humboldt's thought (regarding the project of a "new" Bildung). More generally, the reading that Giorgio Colli gives of the young Nietzsche's thought is used as a critical reagent of the positions exposed and it is also shown that Colli is one of the main heirs of the Nietzschean method. In the final part of the paper, I focus on the distinction between "human" and "humanistic", theorized by the young Nietzsche: my thesis is that, despite the distancing from the humanism of traditional philology, the Nietzschean thought isn't free from a humanistic vocation.