The author of this paper has always thought that the reading of Vico’s work, mostly in its anthropological, historical and political aspects, is a highly original, modern and fertile endeavour. However, certain conceptual and mostly methodological echoes induced him to imagine that, while reading Vico, he was facing a palimpsest of Machiavelli, where the more scabrous, repudiated and problematic features had been erased, in order to adequate it to the context where Vico was publishing, as if Vico had written over the original his new ways, attempting to say what had to be said, and to restate the same the again. Reading Machiavelli in Vico, trying to find out which was the influence of the Florentine thinker upon the Napolitan one, would be, above all, a palimpsestic exercise. For that reason, the author believes that the relationship between Vico and Machiavelli must be studied in the same terms that Croce applies to the relationship between moral and politics, characterizing it as “a problem that may never be resolved”.

La lectura de la obra de Vico, sobre todo en sus vertientes antropológica, histórica y política, le pareció siempre al autor de este ensayo algo sumamente original, moderna y fecunda. No obstante, ciertas resonancias conceptuales, e incluso metodológicas, le inducían a imaginar estar leyendo un palimpsesto de Maquiavelo, en el que se hubieran borrado los detalles más escabrosos, más rechazados, más problemáticos, para el contexto en el que Vico escribía, y se hubiera reescrito sobre el original, nuevos modos, nuevas maneras de decir lo que era necesario decir; y decir de nuevo. Leer a Maquiavelo en Vico, tratar de determinar la influencia habida del pensador florentino en el napolitano, sería un ejercicio, ante todo, palimpséstico. Por eso, cree el autor que la relación entre Vico y Maquiavelo hay que plantearla en los mismos términos que Croce proyecta la relación entre moral y política, caracterizándola como “un problema que quizás nunca pueda resolverse”.