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• Ondina and the ondine: Representation issues (verbal and iconographic) of the sporty woman in fascist Italy (ca. 1933)

  140-160

  Marco Giani

  Views:

  579

  In late 1933, L'Osservatore Romano fuelled an argument against Il Littoriale, mouthpiece of the Fascist sport policy, about women’s sport: the Vatican Italian-speaking newspaper was against the public women’s athletic meetings, and the “immoral” shorts dressed by the young Italian athletes, such as Ondina Valla, going-to-be the first Italian woman to win an Olympic gold medal (1936, Berlin). Which was the situation of Italian female sports, at that time? Which was the influence of new women models coming from US? What was considered “immoral” by conservative people in 1933 Italy watching a women’s athletic or swimming meeting? How Hollywood stars could help Ondina and her mates on the road of female emancipation? These are the questions this essay is going to answer, helped by a lot of historical images, useful to reconstruct a whole collective imagination.

• Woman, that you were a Sun among women ": on the youthful poetic attempts by Paolo Paruta (mid 16th century)

  60-73

  Marco Giani

  Views:

  147

  During 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.