In this article, I will discuss the rare occasion in which a student of one of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan conservatories produced a ‘zibaldone’ (the Italian equivalent for ‘commonplace book’), containing a large number of imitative stock patterns and figurations used to learn to improvise or compose. In this collection, the patterns are applied in a set of 25 two-part pieces, all notated in C1-clef and F-clef. As I will argue in this article, collections such as this one help us to better understand how imitation was learned and taught in practical ways, by memorizing and concatenating imitative stock patterns that students would know from solfeggi, partimenti, keyboard fugues, or even from sacred choral works, such as masses, psalm settings, or solo motets. Moreover, I argue that these stock patterns functioned as a kind of anatomic cross-section of eighteenth-century compositional and improvisational pedagogy, in which imitative patterns were studied both in their simplest forms, as well as in various rhythmic and melodic elaborations in the pedagogical repertoire of these famous institutions.