The article, starting from a brief reflection on Dante’s 2021 anniversary, attempts to offer an overall representation of the author Dante through a concentrated form that mixes scientific precision and brevitas, symbolic concentration and narration; the study therefore presents itself as an experiment that takes place halfway between public discourse and scientific discourse on Dante, in that intermediate area, of equally cultural and political value, which is teaching

La Carestia of the Sicilian poet Domenico Tempio is an allegorical satirical poem that fits into the tradition of southern enlightened reformism, feeding the utopia of peace and social egalitarianism. The article analyzes some frame of the work to grasp the thrust for the renewal of eighteenth-century poetry, through a stylistic use of the poetic language that oscillates between coloriture markedly expressionist and equally visible traces of formal classicism.

The first issue of Conciliatore was published in September 1818; its history includes heated discussions. Silvio Pellico, who was its most consistent proponent, felt himself to be part of a hegemonic intellectual elite. There is a Foscolian mark to the works
of these young intellectuals of the new generation. It is the crisis of a generation that comes to attack the very idea of literature that sees the passage from the certainties of the Enlightenment to the Romantic disquiet. The querelle des anciens et des modernes brought to light the unbridgeable hiatus that put Foscolo in a position of contrast with his friends and pupils. The position assumed by the exile risked placing him against his dearest friends, the Romantics, and bringing him closer to his detractors, the Classicists. Foscolo does not manage to see any possibility of experimenting a valid mediation. A clear symptom of his peremptory closure.

In Mastro-don Gesualdo the body and the gesture are the main mean through which Verga’s writing allows the «unveiling» of the characters’ inner life to the reader. This paper aims to describe how the characters of the novel, consistently with the social processes that Verga intends to represent, live a form of closure to communication that finds its most «exact» representation in silence and, concerning the body, in the pose of the turned shoulders.

Giovanni Verga’s short story Libertà has often been read as a historical source, and its alleged alterations of the historical events of 1860, the bloody revolt in the town of Bronte, on Mount Etna, and the repression carried out by Garibaldi’s troops led by Nino Bixio (the ‘facts of Bronte’) have been noted, even sharply, with the authority of Leonardo Sciascia. We propose here an interpretation of this short story as a literary “monument”, and not as a “document”, noting the immanent tension towards a “truth content” to which Verga’s realism aspires, with its narrative proxy, the renunciation of authorial judgement, the multiplicity of points of view, the friction that derives from their juxtaposition in the narrative also with respect to the perspectives of the readers, who are necessarily called upon to assume responsibility.

A disruptive and recurring image in Italian novels and novellas, starting from the mid-nineteenth century, the train assumes, in the work of Leonardo Sciascia, a peculiar function, not simply thematic. Linked to the indelible memory of the first journey of his childhood, the train soon becomes, for the writer from Racalmuto, a topos to resort to for the representation of some of the literary motifs dearest to him: the exercise of memory, the power of the word, the joy of bodies. Through the textual findings considered most significant, the contribution intends to offer a representative exemplification of the arguments proposed.

The essay studies the relationships between the novel Nottetempo, casa per casa and the linguistic considerations disseminated by Consolo in other texts. Consolo does not limit himself to criticising the language of fascism but broadens his critical analysis to the language of power as such and the languages of opposition, when they are tainted by empty rhetoric. In this sense, the protagonist’s final escape also takes on a palingenetic value from a political point of view

The relationship of esteem and affinity between Apollinaire and Ungaretti involves both biographical and literary levels. While critics have plentifully probed the direct biographical relationships – starting with the encounter of the poets in 1913 – and followed the progress of their friendship during the years of the First World War, the indirect contacts, i.e. those prior to Ungaretti’s arrival in Paris in 1912, would still seem unexplored. Moreover, over the years, various thematic connections have also been proposed; however, certain other thematic and textual tangencies could still reserve new and profitable insights into their hermeneutic key to modernity.

Calvino’s move to Paris in 1967 marks a new phase of his life, in which, inevitably, contact with French culture becomes closer and more direct. The essay examines the relationship that, during the years in Paris and in those of his return to Italy, the writer weaves with the great French classics, in scattered writings and within the Norton Lectures.

La giornata d’uno scrutatore is a fundamental text in Italo Calvino’s itinerary. It marks a divide between a before and an after. In fact, La giornata is placed between the fairytale Calvino and the ‘cosmicomic’ Calvino as a decisive and scandalous encounter with the reality of the body and with the texts of Scripture, in a strong and almost unthinkable nexus, which makes La giornata d’uno scrutatore a Calvinian unicum. To highlight the connection between the call of the body and the Bible is the task of this essay.

The Apocalypse is a mythologema that has provided symbolic forms and narrative structures to contemporary literature: Karl Löwith, Frank Kermode, Ernst Bloch are just some of the scholars who have focused on the endurance and productivity of the apocalyptic paradigm in the secular age. Umberto Eco has entertained a long dealing with the Apocalypse, ever since the publication of Apocalypse Postponed. In his essays and novels, the Apocalypse appears as a dispositive of revelation, but also of concealment and falsification (The Name of the Rose), and as a transmedia model of translation and reuse (Beato di Liebana, Enrico Baj, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana).

The contribution fits within the existing research on the state of health of Italian abroad. It proposes the preliminary results on the linguistic imagination of a qualitative and quantitative research carried out in Toronto in 2022 that involved 100 informants of Italian origin belonging to different migratory generations. The results of the research highlight the pluralistic value of the linguistic imagination of the informants in which Italian strongly competes with other languages within a space of communicative possibilities. They refer to the traditional Italian language space both in Italy, with dialects, and abroad, with Italiese in the Canadian research context.

The Essay reconstructs, in a longue durée Perspective, the Polygenetic Process of «the Birth of the Self», from the Classic Theme in Plauto and Ovidio, through Dante, the Medieval commedia elegiaca, and the Humanistic Tradition of “Cantari”, up to the Florentine Scene and the Machiavellian Turn. As a conclusion, the Subject is not a Modern Invention, but a continuous and open Phenomenon of Rediscovery in Western Culture.

review of Molnos Péter: A valóság szerelmese. Czene Béla festészete, Budapest, Móra Könyvkiadó, 2022, pp. 464.