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Dictionaries, synonymies and usage labels
108-122Views:282The extraordinary richness of the Italian language is not always adequately enhanced by dictionaries. In the era of the digitization of the dictionary, while outdated some definitional procedures continue to survive. Present or past participles that also have adjective functions (e.g. nascente) are sometimes defined with the formula “In the meanings of the verb”. The nouns indicating quality, condition or status (e.g. ordinariness) are often defined with the formula “being + basic adjective (ordinary)”. These definitions, whose informative value is practically zero, certainly do not help to the reader. The structure of a dictionary of synonyms is completely different, which must try to guide the reader in the maze of possible lexical alternatives with the aim of helping him to find the most suitable terms to express the different nuances of the same concept. The search for semantic equivalences thus becomes a discovery of the relevant differences that exist between one word and another. Of essential importance in this regard is the function of the usage labels: the distinction between basic words, words of high use, words of high availability and common words, very useful in many areas, is not of great help for a writer interested in information stylistic. The classification by frequency bands does not warn us e.g. that volto is of higher register than faccia, autovettura is of more formal register than macchina, cinematografo in the sense of ‘cinema hall’ is antiquated compared to cinema
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Luigi Russo: the union of science and life
10-19Views:255In his work as a historian and literary critic, Luigi Russo considered literature not in the perspective of the limited disciplinary knowledge, but always tended to correlate it with wider aspects of reality, history, to “make history” rather than to “know how to read”, to always connect “science” and “life”, theory and practice, study and ethi-cal-political values, according to the teaching of Francesco De Sanctis, set out in the extraordinary Neapolitan prolusion of the same name of 1872, interpreted by Russo in the monograph 1928 Francesco De Sanctis e la cultura napoletana. The work of Luigi Russo, anti-authoritarian, anti-demagogic, anti-dictatorial, can still be a point of reference for those who care about the values of culture and the polis together.
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"Sad is such art and sad what spends / all its time in such works": critical edition and commentary on the Alfabeto de' giuocatori by Giulio Cesare Croce
110-124Views:137Giulio Cesare Croce (1550-1609) was a polygraph who composed several poetical works that describe the daily life of the Bolognese people. This paper examines Alfabeto de’ giuocatori, a poem dedicated to the theme of the game and of the vices and virtues of the players. The author analyzes the poem and discusses the transmission of the text and philological variants. The article is concluded by the critical edition and the commentary (regarding philological, linguistic, lessical and literary aspects).
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ALESSANDRA DINO, A colloquio con Gaspare Spatuzza. Un racconto di vita, una storia di stragi, Bologna, il Mulino, 2016
216-219Views:58review: ALESSANDRA DINO, A colloquio con Gaspare Spatuzza. Un racconto di vita, una storia di stragi, Bologna, il Mulino, 2016
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«Occasioni» and «moments of being»: Montale's modernism
21-37Views:331This paper examines Montale’s position within the critical category of ‘modernism’ not only within the Italian context, but also within the European one. To this end, it aims to trace those presences at a textual level that suggest an affinity between Montale’s ‘occasions’ and Virginia Woolf’s ‘moments of being’: some tiny and rare ‘disguidi del possibile’ that allow to see beyond the cotton wool of everyday life.
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Why read the French classics: Calvino and the lesson of the French masters
119-131Views:73Calvino’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.
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Max Gobbo and the fantasy rewrite of a Renaissance period
122-130Views:112The paper examines thè characteristics of Max Gobbo’s writing in his fantasy novel Alasia - The Iron Maiden. The novel is set in a dystopian XVI century Italy infested by demons, vampires and other strange creatures. The novel unfolds in a clear and flowing prose, supported by a simple and effective writing, expressing thè complexity of a world of darkness, in thè hands of devils. It is full of suspense, of comings and goings, of mythical evocations, as of dramatic moments and a humorous multitone irony.
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For a dream grammar in the "Decameron". Forms and structures of the oneiric themed novels
96-109Views:307This paper takes into account the oneiric issue in Giovanni Boccaccio Decameron, with the aim of defining Boccaccio’s overall “grammar of dreaming”: besides an accurate investigation on Decameron’s sources, which range from classic to Medieval literature, it retraces the narrative constructions of the short-novels with oneiric subjects, hypothesizing the existence of two main schemes. In the short-tales on a vision (which are the most known), it is almost always replied the scheme of the “tale in the tale”, due to the creation of a imaginary world with its own rules. Meanwhile, in the short tales of deceiving, the dream is useful to trick the naive antagonist, making him believe something unbelievable. In both cases, it has a deep influence on the so-called “statute of reality” (Amedeo Quondam): in the first, there is the invention of a new reality; in the second it is deconstructed instead.
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Witnessing "another time within our time": Carlo Levi's Tutto il miele è finito
10-27Views:176Tutto il miele è finito is part of Carlo Levi’s interest in Other cultures and in the continuity of the encounter with the anthropological diversity of Southern Italy inaugurated by Cristo si è fermato a Eboli. This article focuses on the theme of the archaic, and on the perspective of the “contemporaneity of times” that characterizes Levi’s thought, in order to demonstrate how from Tutto il miele è finito emerges the testimony “of another time that precedes history but that is itself contemporary of history and as present as history itself” (G. Agamben).
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«In piedi, guardando dal finestrino». Memoria, parola, corpo nell’immaginario ferroviario di Leonardo Sciascia
73-84Views:46A 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.
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Simone Giusti, Natascia Tonelli: Comunità di pratiche letterarie. Il valore d’uso della letteratura e il suo insegnamento, Torino, Loescher, 2021
152-154Views:110Review for Simone Giusti, Natascia Tonelli: Comunità di pratiche letterarie. Il valore d’uso della letteratura e il suo insegnamento, Torino, Loescher, 2021
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«Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?» .The faces of Brunetto Latini Representation and self-representation
96-107Views:166As in portrait (attributed to Giotto) of Brunetto Latini and Dante Alighieri, history has tended to pair the two poets, who were both exiled from their native Florence. The role played by Brunetto Latini in Florence’s history paralleled that of the orator Cicero in Republican Rome and Dante, his student, was Florence’s Virgil. The famous “Brunetto’s Song” (Canto XV of Inferno) has generated many controversies, determined and justified by an uninterrupted and secular reflection. The encounter between the protagonist-traveler and his master has great importance also from the point of view of the creation of The Divine Comedy. But the old florentine intellectual does not only appear in this canto: in fact, he is the author and, at the same time, the protagonist of the famous opera Il Tesoretto, a didactic-allegorical poem written in volgare. In my study I focus on the figure of Brunetto Latini and on his representation by Dante. At first I examine the protagonist Latini: how he appears in the canto and what his part is in The Divine Comedy. Then I concentrate on the author Latini and I try to identify the poet’s voices in the texts and descriptions according to the context.
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Staying or leaving? On the non-stereotypical representations of Naples
36-53Views:346The literary image of Naples, “Capital of the South”, that sees periodic alternations of crisis and splendour in the arts, is certainly dichotomous: on the one hand the locus amoenus in which inventiveness flourishes and different cultural traditions intersect and live together, on the other the symbolic place of immense social disparities, an outbreak of epidemics and the cradle of a lax and reactionary mentality. The image used by Benedetto Croce to define the city, “a paradise inhabited by devils” dates back to the Middle Ages, and is denied from time to time by the authors who intend to build a positive myth of Napoletanità, but already in the early 20th century, and then especially in the period from 1943 (to the present day), there are increasingly critical accents towards this image, which result - more than in hatred or in contempt for the city and its inhabitants - in a tendency to move away from Naples, to abandon a contradictory reality that does not solve its problems, but like a virgin forest grows back destroying every element of progress. The writers examined in the article are: Carlo Bernari, Anna Maria Ortese, Raffaele La Capria, Fabrizia Ramondino, Ermanno Rea, Giuseppe Montesano, Elena Ferrante.
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Translations belles infidèles. Comments to those of Domenico Tempio's oily compositions
161-182Views:384Belles infidèles is a French expression highlighting a well-known problem in translating from one language to another. This is true especially in the field of literature and particularly in poetry, where the exterior aspects of the words (for example, the harmony of rhymes, the images, the emotional vibrations, the semantic fields, the polysemy, and so on) become substantial and hardly translatable. The essay focuses on some bad translations of some selected verses from the obscene poems by a 18th-century Sicilian dialect poet, Domenico Tempio: they clearly show the translators’ intervention, who took many liberties and betrayed the formulation, the sense and the effect of the original texts. The essay proposes some more faithful translations of them.
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Italy's role in carrying out the Danube Confederation project of 1862
146-161Views:245In the autumn of 1861, a French-Italian-Greek plan was prepared to make Balkan peoples rebel. The leaders of the Hungarian emigration, expecting an upcoming war, consulted on establishing an offensive and defensive alliance between Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Romania. Their aim was, as opposed to in 1848-49, to make the peoples of the Danube region fight against Vienna instead of Pest, thus helping Torino acquire Venice. Ignác Helfy published the essential elements of the emigration discussions in the Alleanza newspaper, edited by himself, titled “Il programma ungherese”, which became a success in the Italian press. The Tribuno newspaper, led by Marco Antonio Canini, besides disputing Alleanza, asked the paper to reveal everything they knew. Shortly thereafter, Canini visited György Klapka and they prepared the plan of the Danubian Confederation - which Victor Emmanuel II approved as well. Canini, preparing for his diplomatic tour in the Balkan region, visited Lajos Kossuth, who thought establishing a defence alliance would be more realistic in that political situation - but Canini convinced him that a confederation had to be created between the nations involved. Kossuth’s comments on Klapka and Canini’s plan were put on paper. However, Helfy indiscreetly published them in his paper, making it impossible for Canini to conduct successful diplomatic negotiations between the countries. Finally, Victor Emmanuel II, who originally wanted one of his relatives to be the ruler of the Greek Kingdom and the leader of the Confederation, withdrew from the plans for the rebellion, due to lack of French support.
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Friulians in the Hungarian industry: a focus on the city of Debrecen
124-145Views:206Emigration played a significant role in the history of the north Italian Friuli for centuries. Since the Middle Age, Friulian emigration was characterized mainly by the movement of itinerant vendors (the so-called cramârs) to the German territories. However, the most noteworthy Friulian migration movement dates back to the fifty years preceding the First World War, when the growing labor market caused by the European industrial development required workers in enormous quantities. During these decades, the AustroHungarian Empire became the main destination of the movement, but the primacy of Austria was surpassed by Hungary in the years between 1892 and 1894. The mass migration in the area (occurring until the outbreak of the First World War) caused lasting changes in the Hungarian industry. The historical sources demonstrate that the presence of the Friulians was significant especially in some sectors, such as construction industry and meat processing. The Friulian companies active in the meat industry during this period had a profound effect on the diffusion and success of a new product: the salami. It should be emphasized that alongside Budapest and Szeged, home of the famous Pick salami, Debrecen also had a pivotal role in this process with its two factories of the Boschetti and Vidoni family and their migrant workers.
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Scrivere e descrivere: La pervasività dell’ekphrasis nella poesia di Edoardo Sanguineti
Views:234This paper aims to explore the all-pervasiveness of the technique of ekphrasis within Edoardo Sanguineti’s poetry, from Laborintus (1956) to Varie ed eventuali (2010). The study is conducted looking at six exemplary texts (Laborintus 3 and 7, Reisebilder 14, Cataletto 1, Corollario 43, Mantova 15) belonging to different periods of Sanguineti’s literary career and comparing them with the visual objects that they describe. In this way, the study tries to show the usage of ekphrasis not only as a simple rhetorical device but also as a primary poetical tool. Finally, the article drafts some future ways for further investigation, such as the cataloguing of all the ekphrasises hidden in Edoardo Sanguineti’s poetry, the application of the theoretical results achieved by the international visual studies, and the possibility of connecting Sanguineti’s ekphrasis with the ones used by other Italian contemporary poets.
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Woman, that you were a Sun among women ": on the youthful poetic attempts by Paolo Paruta (mid 16th century)
60-73Views:136During the mid-1560s, Paolo Paruta (1540-1598), future Ambassador of the Republic of Venice in Rome (1591-1595) and author of the three books of Perfettione della Vita Politica (Venice, 1579) wrote some poems: the canzone Donna, che fosti tra le donne un Sole, and three somnets. The former was then published in Dionigi Atanagi’s Rime di diversi nobilissimi et eccellentissimi autori, in morte della Signora Irene delle Signore di Spilimbergo (Venice, 1561), the latters were insert in Diomede Borghesi’s anthology for Cinzia Braccioduro Garzadori (then published in Padua, 1567, without Paruta’s somnets).
Writing those juvenile poems and making them circulate among the Venetian literary circles (such as Domenico Venier’s), Paruta was looking not only for artistic approval, but also for social visibility: the canzone and the somnets were part of his wider strategy for social climbing inside Venetian patrician ruling class.