This contribution identifies some common threads that run through Ennio Flaiano's disparate narrative production, linking Tempo di uccidere-debut novel and unicuum in the author's work-with the short and very short stories, and also with some screenplays. The recurring chronotope of the street and the dynamics of error, as well as the accumulative and 'enfilading structures' turn out to be different faces of the same tension towards 'putting into form' that punctually fails, like any attempt to identify the logic that guides reality, the true chimera of Flaiano's narratives.
Giulio Carlo Argan believes that a partial elimination of the semiotic barriers between words and images is possible and uses expressions taken from Linguistics, Grammar, Language History, Literature in order to explain figurative phenomena. This paper examines from an inter-disciplinary point of view the strategies applied by Argan in Storia dell'arte italiana (1968-1970), Arte moderna. 1770-1970 (1970) and several essays, where he utilizes terms and syntagms taken from Linguistics and Literature in order to enlighten the most remarkable and fascinating issues in History of Art. Argan's works have always been analysed almost exclusively from an artistic perspective, so studying them with the instruments of Literary studies could reveal an innovative methodology and prelude future researches.
This paper analyses Franco Rossetti's film Delitto al circolo del tennis (Italia 1969), and identifies its socio-political discourse in the light of a new and detailed interpretation of Moravia's 1928 story Delitto al circolo di tennis, whose title, but little else, is intentionally taken up in the screenplay. When viewed fluently, the overall perception is that the film, treacherously, retains nothing of the original story, offering a completely different story to its audience. Here, however, we intend to demonstrate how such manifest dissimilarity turns out to be, in a 'metatextual' adaptive logic, the stabilizing element that allows us to reach a level of deeper and convincingly dialectical correspondence.
This essay examines the gender shifting of the lyric I and the lyric you in the poetry of Tommaso Baldinotti (1451-1511) from Pistoia, based on an extensive survey of his poems. Five collections have been examined in their entirety: Petretum, Liber Pamphilianus and the three homoerotic collections from the Forteguerriano A 58 codex. Although Baldinotti's poetry collections have recently been edited, they remain completely unexplored. The essay shows that Baldinotti uses poetry to experiment with different erotic constellations and speech situations. Besides the classic Petrarchan speech situation, in which a male lover addresses a female beloved, Baldinotti stages a speech situation involving a male lover and a male beloved. The oscillation between a love object marked as male and one marked as female can certainly be interpreted as a tactic of concealment. However, it must be acknowledged that Baldinotti's lyric persona also explicitly expresses simultaneous desire for both male and female love partners. The author experiments with female speaker roles, addresses both male and female love objects, and, by refraining from clear gender markings, sometimes creates queer speech situations that allow the reader absolute freedom in imagining the gender constellation described. On this basis, the speech situation in Baldinotti's poetry can be viewed as queer for the first time.
& centerdot; Italian psychiatrists-writers of the 21st century: disease narrative & centerdot; The article focuses on the representation of mental illness in 21st century Italian fiction from the perspective of the psychiatrist: disease narrative. The narrative works of some psychiatrists-writers will be analyzed, comparing the characteristics of psychopathographies written from the psychiatrist's perspective with those written from the patient's perspective. The relationship between writing and therapy will also be analyzed.
My article aims to focus on the essential hermeneutic function of rhetoric in order to redefine the Humanist model of knowledge. I shall investigate how, between Francesco Petrarca and Leon Battista Alberti, the Humanist debate on imitation-deeply related to the transformation of classical rhetorical categories-sheds light on the making of a new idea of temporality. Specifically, I shall question the merely stylistic approach to rhetoric and imitation by exploring how their relationship shapes not only the Humanist approach to antiquity but also the complex interweaving between an ongoing past and the dynamic process connecting the present with the future.
& centerdot; A Portrait of the Irredentist as a Young Man. Giuseppe Picciola between 1869 and 1881 & centerdot; This archival research is about the formative years of the irredentist poet Giuseppe Picciola. The three parts are named after three cities, Trieste, Graz and Pisa. In Trieste Picciola attended the municipal gymnasium (1869-1877): various documents-two short articles in & laquo;L'Esordiente & raquo;; an unpublished ode imitating Carducci; a translation of Horace's Ars poetica-testify to his first steps in the political-literary field. Following police investigations launched in Trieste, three Trieste irredentists are put on trial in Graz (1878-1879); Picciola, involved in absentia on circumstantial grounds, was forbidden to return to the Julian city until 1899. In Pisa he attended the University and the Scuola Nor-male (1877-1881), and wrote two dissertations, one for a degree, the other for a teaching qualification. For the first time the essay presents his letters to D'Ancona and his degree thesis on Tibullus.
This article examines the material and textual components of the chartae containing Petrarch's Canzoniere discovered at the Library of the Seminary in Gorizia, Italy, in 1973, providing both a detailed report of the finding and an updated description of the codex, named "G", after its chartae were restored and reassembled in 1980. On the basis of an expanded collatio, which includes some manuscripts representing the early circulation of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, the article explores the textual connections of G with other central copies of the manuscript tradition of Petrarch's poetry, and proposes a reassessment of the concept of "Chigi tradition" and "Laurentian tradition". Lastly, the inspection of the variety of layouts employed for the five genres of the Rvf evinces further the value of the Gorizia codex as witness of a production of the Rvf still in progress.
Opera in Music Between Literary Studies and Musicology. Methodological Reflections in Dia-logue with a Recent Book by an Italianist Starting from a recent book by Roberto Gigliucci, the article reflects on the relationship between literary studies, historical musicology, and musicology oriented towards a dialogue with performance studies and media studies. The ambiguity of the concept 'parola intonata' (intoned word), at the core of the book's title, leads to the proposal of a rethinking of the relationship between text, performance and media in the field of opera studies. On that basis, the article responds to the interdisciplinary dialogue established by Gigliucci in his book, hypothesizing musicological integrations to his analyses and hermeneutic proposals.
The article proposes an edition of the collection Un cono d'ombra by Margherita Guidacci. The collection, written between 1951 and the early 1960s, is composed of two parts in prose, hitherto unpublished, and twelve poems, which in terms of compositional occasion, themes and situations are very similar to the contemporary poetic collections Avourneen (unpublished, 1965-1967) and Neurosuite (Neri Pozza, 1970). The article also emphasizes how the poet's activities as a translator and scholar of Anglo-American literature are inseparable from her original production.
This paper re-examines Boccaccio's testimony (rejected by the communis opinio) about the start of the 'poema sacro' in Florence, before his exile. Through the analysis of the ancient sources, it is considered as highly likely that Boccaccio was not the author of the 'novel' on the first Florentine cantos (the famous 'quadernuccio'), since there are other sources that report the same story but with details absent in Boccaccio. With extreme caution there is also evidence suggesting that Francesco Petrarch also had vague information about a (unnamed) work of Dante's begun before his exile. But as to what that 'quadernuccio' actually contained, one can only speculate.
This article reports on a significant discovery made during research at the Central Library in Tenri (Nara, Japan), as part of the Iter Iaponicum project. The research uncovered a previously unknown manuscript of Goro Dati's Sfera. After introducing the Japanese library, the paper provides a detailed description of the codex and compares it to other manuscripts in the extensive tradition of the Sfera, including twenty additional newly identified witnesses. The article also reconstructs the complex journey of the manuscript from Italy to the library of a prominent religious institution in Japan.
This essay compares the methods used to construct the figure of the criminal in the novels of the Neapolitan writer Francesco Mastriani-particularly in I Vermi: Studi storici su le classi pericolose in Napoli (1863-64)-with those employed by phrenology and the emerging criminal sciences. Its aim is to show how nineteenth-century popular literature, moving in parallel with scientific discourse, was able both to anticipate and to echo the issues that would later become central to Lombroso's case studies, at times offering a more nuanced portrayal while also contributing to the crystallization of an imaginary that affirms the existence of a 'dangerous class'. This reciprocal exchange is especially noteworthy: on one hand, it reveals how serial literature sought to present itself as a 'study' with social utility; on the other, it exposes the significant fictional elements at play in the scientific construction of the criminal type.
This article examines a new document relevant to the biography of Bonagiunta Orbicciani, a pivotal figure in thirteenth-century Italian poetry before Dante, and a notary active in Lucca during the mid-1200s. The new source, dated 1274, extends the timeframe for Bonagiunta's life, formerly based on the latest extant document testifying to his activity, dated 1257. According to the new evidence, the study offers a revised prosopographical profile of the poet and invites a broader reconsideration of his role within the intellectual and literary context of the Stilnovo movement.
This short essay focuses on the relationship between Petrarch and Boccaccio from 1350-51, with particular attention to dantean open questions. After having highlighted the possible dating of the poem Ytalie iam certus honos, the numerous interpretative problems of Fam. xxi 15 are examined, for which a new chronology is proposed. A final examination is reserved for the autograph marginal note by Petrarch in Vat. Lat. 3199, suggesting a new interpretation.
The Triangular Relationship of the Protagonists and the Levels of Reading of Cima delle nobildonne The article deals with the analysis of the relationship between Mattia Meli, Irina Simiodice and Amadeus Planika in Cima delle nobildonne by Stefano D'Arrigo. The starting point of the study is the transcription and reading of the original introduction cut off by the author just before the book release and published for the first time during an interview with Mirella Serri by his wife Jutta Bruto in 1993, after her husband death. The pages were probably cut off because they contrasted with the open ending of the text, but they shed however light on the relationships between the three main actors of the story and help to clarify some passages of the novel, revealing its reading levels.
Do Not Neglect. A Rebus (and a Last Commandment) by Primo Levi Published in April 1986, Primo Levi's rebus Gelide mani trascurate, conceived and drawn thanks to a computer graphics program, is one of the best-known evidences of the writer's penchant for language games and puzzle experimentation. The apparent lightness of these ludolinguistic practices is intertwined, in Levi, both with a taste for manipulating verbal material and, in some cases, with a desire to evoke through unexpected forms the more serious themes of his narrative work. The essay thus proposes a reading of the rebus that identifies in the iconic-verbal mechanism of this authorial divertissement some references to the main topics of I sommersi e i salvati. These topics are inscribed in the dialogue between the author and the solver of the rebus and they intended to evoke indirectly, with thoughtful understatement, the atrocity of the lager and the drama of survival.
The essay addresses the intertextual analysis of one of the most significant texts of Giovanni Della Casa's Rime, canzone xLVII. After offering a summary of the formal and thematic aspects that make this book strongly eccentric with respect to the more traditional petrarchist tradition, the author emphasises the song's function as a narrative turning point (the definitive abandonment of the love theme) and its character as a crucial junction of the entire poetic book. The song, in fact, on the basis of the simile of life as a troubled path, recapitulates what precedes it and largely anticipates subsequent developments, revealing itself to be a true intratextual crossroads. The author then reviews the main intertextual influences within the canzone, adding several new elements compared to the critical tradition of commentaries and contributions dedicated to it: the Bible, Dante's Purgatorio, Petrarch, Bembo, Giovanni Guidiccioni. Finally, the essay sheds light on a final distinctive aspect of Casa's poetic language, namely its philosophical density.
Substantiality and Emptiness of the Shadows of the Commedia. Narrative Instances and the Effect on the Reader Within the structure of the 'poema sacro', narrative is often subordinated by critics to other ideological issues deemed central to the poet's intentions. This exegetical approach, which does not adequately take into account the diegetic instance, has led to inconclusive interpretations of many critical passages in the Commedia. Through the analysis of one of the most signifi-cant of these cases, the contradictory representation of the shadows in Dantean afterlife, which vary from being 'solid' to 'empty', this article aims to revalue the pivotal role of narrative. It is argued that, within the narrative, even the most glaring inconsistencies may find a synthesis by means of a cultural context that is not entirely defined, where plot inconsistencies are not perceived as problematic, and where the essential Christian doctrine allows room for innovation.
This paper examines the unpublished correspondence between Eugenio Montale and Elena Croce. The letters evidence a long friendship that led Montale to precious collaborations but remained overlooked by critics. This study will highlight the main elements of interest in the correspondence (1947-1981), identifying three sectors in which Croce's mediation is significant: the English translation of Montale's poetry, the publication of new poems in magazines, and the involvement in the project for the protection of the Italian environmental heritage. This paper will shed new light on the relationship between the two writers, illuminating a dense network of intellectuals connected to them, active in Rome in the mid-twentieth century.
