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• Pepe-Lamartine A literary controversy and a duel for the Risorgimento

  64-79

  Gabriele Paolini

  Views:

  251

  The essay reconstructs the reactions in Florence provoked by the publication of Alphonse de Lamartine’s Le dernier chant du pelerinage d’Harold (1825), inspired by Lord Byron’s unfinished work. The portrait of absolute decadence of contemporary Italy, with the definition of its inhabitants as “polvere d’uomini”, outraged the intellectuals, who would have liked to respond in Vieusseux’s Anthology, the most important periodical of the time. Pietro Giordani also intended to reply to Lamartine by publishing an essay about Operette Morali of the young (and still unknown) Giacomo Leopardi, portrayed as a great and living Italian. Censorship prevented this and other responses, but not a harsh reference contained in a booklet by the Neapolitan exile Gabriele Pepe. His pride wounded, Lamartine (at the time in charge of the French embassy in Florence) challenged Pepe to a duel.
  Pepe’s victory sparked a great enthusiasm in Florence and throughout Italy. The theme of offended honor (the symbolic kind, of the Italian homeland and of its Sons) and avenged with a Proof of Value became a constant and was imitated many other times, in reality and in literature, feeding the imagination of several generations.

• Success and Translation of Italian Literature in Hungary

  20-35

  Péter Sárközy

  Views:

  259

  Literary criticism, both in Hungary and in Italy, has paid great attention to the fortune and irradiation of Italian literature in Hungary, just think of the thirteen volumes, the result of the scientific collaboration of the Giorgi Cini Foundation of Venice and of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The article aims to offer a broad overview of the success of the Italian literature in Hungary, especially through translations. The article reviews the various historical periods and literary movements that characterized the literary contacts between the two countries. Until the second half of the eighteenth century, the irradiation of Italian literature was first of all manifested in the use of literary models and poetic formulas in the works of the major authors of Hungarian literature. The 19th century saw instead the season of translation of the great classics of the first Italian literature (Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio) translated again in the twentieth century, thanks also to the commitment of the Magyar Italianists. Finally, the article focuses on the present situation, describing the translations of contemporary authors

• Max Gobbo and the fantasy rewrite of a Renaissance period

  122-130

  Franco Zangrilli

  Views:

  122

  The 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.

• Witnessing "another time within our time": Carlo Levi's Tutto il miele è finito

  10-27

  Giuliana Pias

  Views:

  186

  Tutto 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).