Zibaldone vs Commonplace Books

Which are you using?

I am a geek who loves notebooks. Not only do I love notebooks, but I also love learning about them—all the different types and where they originated.

Want to know what drives me mental? More mental than those annoying book stickers? When people mix up a zibaldone and a commonplace book.

What does it matter, you might ask? Honestly, it doesn’t. Call it a pet peeve. In my mind though, if you are making a YouTube video on the subject, you should at least get it right. I’m not mentioning names.

Mad scribblings is not a commonplace book, thank you very much. It’s a zibaldone.

These two very different beasts are lumped into the same bucket like they’re interchangeable. They’re not. They’re cousins at best. Possibly estranged ones.

Most people use the term commonplace book as a catch-all for any notebook with scraps of thoughts, clippings, quotes or random intellectual graffiti. But if you’re calling your chaotic dump of dreams, grocery lists, angry rants about your ex and half-finished poems a commonplace book. Hate to break it to you, but you’re running a zibaldone.

So What Is a Zibaldone?

Zibaldone is Italian for “a heap of things.” No joke. It’s a hodgepodge, a mess. But a beautiful, intimate mess. Think: mind-splatter on paper. No categories. No rigid structure. Just flow.

A zibaldone is personal. Often emotional or observational. A mix of notes, drafts, musings, receipts, letters, and dreams. It is beautiful in its disorder.

Famous examples include:

• Giacomo Leopardi: Over 4,500 pages of thought. Philosophy, linguistics, literature, and depression. The man unloaded his soul onto the page.

• Leonardo da Vinci: Okay, he never called his notebooks zibaldoni, but they are textbook examples of the form. Mechanical sketches next to grocery lists next to dissections of clouds. Brilliant chaos.

• Umberto Eco: While more of a modern indexer, Eco’s private notebooks often resembled zibaldoni in content if not in name. Streams of notes on semiotics and soup recipes side by side.

What About a Commonplace Book?

Now this is something else entirely.

A commonplace book is a place of structure and purpose. It is a tool, not a diary. A curated collection. Think of it like a personal encyclopaedia. People kept them for study, memorisation and retrieval. Renaissance scholars, scientists and Enlightenment thinkers loved them. These weren’t journals. These were intellectual filing cabinets.

They are categorised by topic, sometimes indexed, sometimes cross-referenced. The goal is to make knowledge easier to access and reuse.

A commonplace book boasts an impressive collection of users:

• John Locke: The poster boy for the commonplace system. He wrote instructions on how to organise one.

• Thomas Jefferson: Had several. One was entirely dedicated to legal principles.

• Virginia Woolf: Kept one while studying Greek.

So Which Are You Using?

Are you highlighting quotes for later and then putting them into subject-specific areas? Then you are using a commonplace book.

But if you are jotting down thoughts, dreams and using a catch-all approach, then you are keeping a zibaldone.

Too many writers and thinkers, especially in the digital age, throw all their creative offcuts into Notion or Evernote and call it a “digital commonplace book.” But let’s be honest, half of that stuff is raw zibaldone.

And that’s fine. But let’s call things by their true names.

So embrace the mess.

The best ideas come dressed as scribbles.

Until next week — remember, read to learn. Read to escape. Read to smile.

Sam 😊

I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now. - Field Notes

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