This article explores the representation of one of the minor characters in Tommaso Stigliani's 1628 Italian epic poem on Columbus' early adventures in the new world. Comparing Stigliani's account of the character, Sifante, with the account of the corresponding character in his source text, the article suggests that Stigliani's mixed representation of Sifante as someone who stands between virtue and vice reflects Stigliani's perspective on the Spanish mission, poised between acknowledgement of the wrongs inflicted upon the native peoples by the Spanish and celebration of the Spanish achievement in the new world. In addition, the treatment of Sifante's wife reveals Stigliani's intermediate position between acknowledging women's autonomy and reaffirming stereotypical views of feminine emotionality and passivity.
This article focuses on the parallels between Luigi Pirandello's poetry and fiction. More specifically, it sheds light on the resonances between Pirandello's sonnet 'A un olivo' ('An Olive Tree') (1908) and his well-known short story 'La giara' ('The Jar') (1908). Analysing those resonances, we argue that the short story echoes the poem and offers variations on the same theme, a strategy that Pirandello consistently uses in his repertory. That theme, we suggest, is constrained freedom. We therefore explore thematic and formal manifestations of that constrained freedom in the two texts, which anticipate fascist Italy and its attendant cultural and political pressures. We further claim that Pirandello's complex and often contradictory attitude towards Mussolini's regime, along with his uneasy relationship with Italian literary critics, brings into sharper focus the constraints on his poetic freedom and the strategies by which he negotiated them.
This article offers a comparison between the thought of Giacomo Leopardi and the seventeenth-century Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, establishing a previously unexplored connection between two prominent figures in Italian and Scottish cultures. The study examines the authors' attitudes towards death, and in so doing highlights changing perspectives on this subject in Western culture. It emphasises both the affinities that link the two writers, arising from shared philosophical concerns, and the ways their differing metaphysical and religious beliefs shape distinct interpretations of mortality and human existence. The analysis is based on a textual comparison between Drummond's A Cypress Grove: or, Philosophical Reflections against the Fear of Death and Leopardi's Operette Morali and Canti. This article represents the first critical study to re-examine A Cypress Grove in the light of Leopardi's literary production.
Considering four case studies and focusing on inventio, this article examines the rhetorical sources and strategies underlying the direct speeches that Niccol & ograve; Machiavelli included in his Istorie fiorentine. In doing so, it also explores how the rhetorical texture of these speeches compares with Machiavelli's other writings, both prose and poetry, as well as with the practice of deliberative rhetoric in Florence, particularly in the context of the so-called Consulte e pratiche. As a result, this analysis highlights some of the ways in which classical rhetorical precepts lived on in Machiavelli's writings and, more broadly, in Renaissance Florence's practices of political deliberation. At the same time, it suggests that a rhetorical approach can foster a more holistic exegesis of Machiavelli's works.
While no Italian city had a High Renaissance inscriptional landscape to match that of Venice, the lagoon city's role as proving ground for the revival, development and dissemination of Roman capitals on writing for public display has been critically overlooked. The present essay challenges the unsatisfactory consensus narrative around the great classicising epigraphic renewal and foregrounds the Venetian contribution. I apply close reading and cross-comparison of the surviving evidence in three fully-illustrated sections - Innovation, Competition, Affirmation - to shed new light on the dynamics that forged Venice's uniquely flexible and influential inscriptional settlement. I document the pioneering introduction of a forceful mid-imperial style in the first half of the Quattrocento, decades before the Humanist palaeographic ferment centred on Padua. I show that, paradoxically, the more finessed Humanist script aesthetic achieved its epigraphic breakthrough in Venice itself. I end by examining the creative twinning of Venice's two capital modes around 1500.
This article investigates metaphors of origins in contemporary transnational writing in Italian. Focusing on Gabriella Ghermandi's Regina di fiori e di perle (2007), it explores how the tension and interplay between arborescent and rhizomatic cognitive models of origins (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus) are enacted across imagery, plot, language, and structure. Although the arborescent model remains foundational, the novel destabilises essentialist notions of origins, belonging, and subjectivity, through metaphoric and formal interventions that generate rhizomatic ruptures. Rearticulating origins and the memory of the past from a relational and transnational perspective, Ghermandi's novel opens imaginative spaces of belonging that encompass the diasporic realities of contemporary globalised societies. Through the interplay between arborescent and rhizomatic models, transnational literature unlocks the possibility of unstable, self-designated origins, advancing alternative conceptualisations of subjectivity.
This article argues that Elio Vittorini's novels Conversazione in Sicilia (1941), Uomini e no (1945), and Il Sempione strizza l'occhio al Frejus (1947) trace a progression in his thought through their symbolic use of family structures. The organisation of the family-matriarchal, patriarchal, or post-patriarchal-functions as a metaphor for Italy's historical, social, and moral evolution. Focusing on the elephant-grandfather in Il Sempione, I argue that he embodies a generational legacy both prosperous and complicit in the rise of Fascism. As a figure marked by ambivalence, he must be symbolically 'eliminated' to enable renewal. Reading the three novels in dialogue, and in light of key literary and biblical allusions, the article shows how Vittorini moves beyond a Manichaean worldview toward a more complex vision of post-war social reconstruction.
This article introduces a special issue that explores what scholars might be able to learn from examining Sicily, the Mediterranean, and the idea of the 'South' together. It asks the following question: What emerges when we attempt to do this in the current moment, in which a renewed public and academic attention is being directed towards Sicily? After exploring the long shadow of the 'Southern Question', which for decades dominated scholarship on Sicily - not least within the field of Italian Studies - we go on to examine some central themes that recur in the articles included in this collection: stereotypes and self-stereotypes; the 'cosmopolitan' Mediterranean; religion; gender; race; and folklore. These articles come from different disciplines and present differing epistemological approaches. Together, they bring to the surface the need for reflexivity and a rethinking of author biases: a need that goes well beyond the Sicilian context.
Over the last three decades, Palermo has been rebranded as a cosmopolitan and hospitable Mediterranean city reborn after a long interlude of corruption, crime, and economic decline. This article critically interrogates these dominant imaginaries by centring the experiences of Chandy, a young Hindu woman of Tamil descent, alongside those of the Tamil community in Palermo, one of the largest and oldest migrant communities in the city. Through a focus on devotion to the patron saint Rosalia, we explore both how young Tamils forge a sense of spiritual citizenship through their ritual practices, and how their involvement in these practices is inserted - and in turn flattened - in political imaginaries of cosmopolitan Palermo. We argue that the encounters that unfold through Sicilian popular devotion offer alternative modes of relating across difference, highlighting the exclusionary effects of liberal cosmopolitanism while also cautioning against efforts to celebrate and define these encounters as Mediterranean.
In considering the Introduction and contributions of this special issue, this afterword returns to the challenge and the puzzle that our editors have posed: to examine together the Mediterranean and Mediterraneanism from a Sicilian perspective and to ask how analyses of Mediterraneanism might help us examine the 'global transformations' that demand our attention as Italianists. I discuss how the essays in this special issue prompt us to consider the set of references and associations that the Mediterranean Sea makes available for understanding Sicily's transnational peculiarity. While emblematic Mediterraneanist tropes and stock figures might be broadly absent from the composite account of Sicily offered by this special issue, the ongoing dynamics of the Mediterranean inform the social realities that it recounts and, therefore, illuminate the privileged perspective Sicily provides on transnational transformations, both within and beyond the Mediterranean.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, Southern Italy has frequently been depicted as an exoticised and sexualised destination, often through the instrumentalisation of its own cultural tradition. The teste di moro, traditional head-shaped ceramic vases, are a prime example of this process and have recently been used in the TV show The White Lotus (2022) to narrate a story of unruly jealousy interwoven with Sicily. Simultaneously, local LGBTQIA+ artists are today reworking the teste di moro, troubling the rhetoric of Southern sexual backwardness. Adopting a transmedial perspective, the article analyses the ceramics created by artist and designer Cori Amenta, the drag outfits by performer La Diamond, and the graphic novel Basilic & ograve; (2016) by Giulio Macaione. It argues that the three artists provide a counter-narrative take on the teste di moro, questioning exoticising processes, creating the means to tell the story of 'the other', and even queering the Southern cultural tradition.
Saints' festivals serve as key arenas for negotiating social order and identity in Sicily and the central Mediterranean. They have long constituted spaces in which the delicate balance between state, Church, and society is (re)negotiated through identity-shaping processes. Over the past three decades, however, these negotiations have become increasingly complex due to rapid socio-economic change. This article examines the cultural construction of multi-scalar identities within ritual space, focusing on the celebrations of St Agatha, the patron saint of Catania. It explores devotional practices as means of negotiating identity and social order, understood as part of a flexible system of interaction. By offering a fresh perspective on the coexistence of multiple orders, the article contributes to debates on Mediterranean syncretism and highlights the need for closer analysis of religious practices to better capture the complex interplay between religion and politics in the Mediterranean.
As a region in which the multiple crises that afflict contemporary Southern Italy converge - economic stagnation, precarity, rural decline - Sicily is also a location from which to reflect upon complexities that far transcend its shores. Yet, it remains widely imagined as sui generis, a multivalent symbol overburdened with stereotypes of corruption, decay, fatalism, and mafia. Such 'Sicilian things' exercise outsized influence on global imaginaries while also resonating locally through self-consciously defensive postures. In taking stock of Sicily's countless commonplaces, this article investigates the aestheticization and commodification of 'Sicilian things', including the island's revisioning by various actors as a kind of 'Mediterranean crossroads' that satisfies cosmopolitan yearnings. Throughout this exploration of the interplay between externally generated narratives and internal self-perceptions, Sicily emerges simultaneously as a site of Pirandellian contradiction, a battleground of cultural meanings, and a fertile site for generating anthropological insights for the twenty-first century.
This article explores the approach towards race in relation to regional identity in the music of two Black Sicilian rappers from Palermo, Jesse the Maestro and Johnny Marsiglia. I argue that while Jesse the Maestro often uses a provocative approach, Johnny Marsiglia frequently uses a direct approach towards race: choices motivated by personal perceptions of their identity and different strategies for succeeding in Italy's predominantly white, mainstream rap scene and music industry, largely located in the Northern Italian city of Milan. Nonetheless, they both engage in the process of 'rapping back' through the linguistic choices in their music to de-essentialise and decolonise Sicilianness with regard to race. In doing so, these artists promote an inclusive Sicilian identity that reflects the increasingly diverse youth of the region and country while simultaneously honouring Sicily's historical relationship with Africa and Blackness.
This ethnographic contribution considers Sicilian oliviculturalists' navigation and implementation of stereotypes about Sicily and Sicilians - specifically, Sicily's metonymic misrepresentation, vis-& agrave;-vis the Southern Question, as the 'backwards South'. My interlocutors employed forms of strategic essentialism to put negative stereotypes and their counternarratives to work, narratively and economically. Interlocutors used strategic essentialism to create and claim a place identity, sicilianit & agrave;, which reflected how they saw and imagined themselves, their livelihoods, and their place. I argue that in this, they are participants in a long tradition of Southern thought, or thinking from the South,11Franco Cassano, Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean, trans. by Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme (Fordham University Press, 2012) . that has the potential to open up horizons for postcolonial futures in Sicily marked by specificity, creativity, and solidarity-interlocutors' version of Sicilianness or sicilianit & agrave;-rather than by generalisations, immobility, and backwardness-markers instead of sicilianismo or the 'myth of Sicily'.22Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider, 'Mafia, Antimafia, and the Plural Cultures of Sicily', Current Anthropology, 46.4 (2005), pp. 501-20, doi:10.1086/431529.
