On March 1, 1944, upon receiving the Accademia Chigiana Quaderni dedicated to Vivaldi, Olga Rudge wrote to Count Chigi Saracini: “[Pound] looked envyingly at those elegant volumes! – his notes on the Malatesta manuscripts, and the Siena Cavalcanti, and the famous ‘Monte’ are always on his mind, but now it seems that his ‘Studi Sienesi’ will be published in…Venice!” Unfortunately, that plan was never realized, but Olga's letter gives us an idea of the high regard Pound had for the material that the Sienese sources provided for three separate projects.

Pound's systematic use of archival documentation had begun in 1911 when his reading of the troubadours shifted from secondary to primary sources. His belief in the “resurrection” (SL, 131) of lost details (for instance, Arnaut's melodies), together with his increasing need to test the accuracy of a printed text would in the long run shape his twofold personal philological techné, consisting of “paleography,” as with the 1932 Cavalcanti, for which he required reproductions of manuscripts “so as to show what we really do know and can know…How the stuff was first written down” (EPS, 373); and then of recovering “the facts, original documents, etc.,” in order to prove “how loosely some history is written” (EPS, 180). Consequently, the “‘aesthetic’ pleasure” he derived from the “‘unmediated’ experience with the documents produced by a culture that fascinated him” would never be entirely separate from the intellectual pleasure that the transmission of cultural data was capable of providing.