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Foscolo and the friends of the Conciliatore
31-46Views:39The 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. -
Hungarian POWs in Padula during the First World War
Views:261The prisoner of war camp of Padula, Italy, operated during World War One in a large Carthusian Monastery and barracks, has been the topic of several Italian, Czech and Slovakian studies, as it was one of the greatest Italian camps and served as the centre for the creation of the Czechoslovak Legion. However, thousands of its detainees were Hungarian, whose life has barely been discussed. This paper aims to present the life of Hungarian POWs held in Padula. With the help of sources pertaining to them, such as letters and memoirs, it is possible to deeply examine four aspects: religion, health, complaints and employment. Another aim of the study is to make a list of the Hungarian prisoners.
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Italy between history and historiography. In search of national identity
62-76Views:13Starting from the fundamental studies of the historian Giuseppe Galasso and in the context of a close confrontation with the most experienced European historiography on these topics, the essay reconstructs some issues of the italian national identity through the different guidelines of the historiographical debate from the nineteenth century to today in a comparative and historical setting of european modernity. The centuries-old duration of the events related to the process of formation of the Italian identity, from the tradition of the Roman Empire to the Risorgimento and national independence, passing through the long domination of foreign powers, finally ended with the unification of the peninsula and the state-building in 1861. The most significant terms of the identity discourse are thus affirmed: territory and nation, whose underlying grounds, however, still struggle to find shared reasons for a unitary understanding of the national historical framework. In this respect the category of national identity starts its construction at the time of the Romantic ferments and remains intimately linked to those anthropological traits that would have provided to found in the mid-nineteenth century the community of Italians, finally rejoined under the frame of a new State. Not a single identity, therefore, but a multiplicity of references to the rich, centuries-old Italian cultural heritage, rethought in the light of a decisive season for national destinies.
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In favor of the "great mutilated". Pro-Hungarian Italian publications and the Transylvanian question in the interwar period
54-63Views:197The essay describes how was approached the Transylvanian question during the interwars period in Italy, by a part of the Italian intelligentsia particularly pro Hungarian.
Authors and books reflect in somehow the pro Hungary position emerged during the Twenties in Italy, supported by the revisionism of Fascist government and improved during the Thirties. Several books and essays proposed to change the borders between Hungary and Romania, until the Italian-German negotiation and the Vienna Diktat of 1940 -
Italiano: Italiano
Views:119In the essay Note sulla tradizione spirituale e religiosa Quondam denounced the prejudice which for a long time excluded from the field of “literature” the experiences of religious poetry of the pre-baroque era. The issue is greater in the field of figurative arts, where sacred poetry and those who dealt with it still find it hard to establish themselves as sources for the knowledge of works and artistic languages. This is the case of the Venetian Maurizio Moro, a canon and scholar who lived between the 16th and 17th centuries, known above all as the author of the commentary verses on Dürer’s Little Passion (Venice, 1612). The essay discusses the author’s composition on the «Imagine del Salvatore, dal Pordenon pittor famoso dipinta». The text, published in 1609 within the Amorosi stimoli dell’anima penitente and still unknown to those who have treated the Friulan painter, bears witness to a work not otherwise known, re-evaluating Moro as a precious source for art history and criticism.
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The exaltation of Italian national identity in the discourse of Matteo Renzi
74-95Views:136Nations are one of the most well-established constructs in our society, and they represent a very attractive benchmark for personal and social identification. Political speeches, as well as, for example, media discourse and popular culture, constantly reiterate myth, culture and history of nations in order to reaffirm and preserve their positive image, and this tendency doesn’t seem to be weakened by some contemporary events like globalization and the reinforcement of transnational systems.
As a proof of this trend, the present work proposes an in-depth analysis of the speech held by the then Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi at the European Parliament on the occasion of the inauguration of the Italian semester of presidency on July 2, 2014, aiming to demonstrate that also supranational contexts are exploited to reiterate national identity and priorities.
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The VVV project: lexicography, IT and social networks at the service of linguistic promotion
136-149Views:162This contribution is based on a project in lexicography and provides important insight about the promotion of Valoc’, an endangered dialect spoken in Val Masino (Lombardy, Italy). The aim of the VVV project is to develop the new dictionary, based on anthropological and dialectological research. Thanks to our methodological approach we aim to observe practices of Valoc’, its transmission from one generation to another and discourses mainly supporting ideologies in relation to language practices and identity. In this paper, we would like to present the context, described from a linguistic and sociolinguistic point of view, focusing on the importance of promoting Valoc’ through lessons, conferences, the dictionary and social network. In fact, thanks to our haven in social network, it was possible to observe the evolution of the language and analyse the way speakers deal with the exercise of writing.
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«Odio finanche la lingua che si parla». Power and freedom in Vincenzo Consolo's Nottetempo, casa per casa
85-95Views:18The 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
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Secondary school adolescents: identity, languages and hereditary languages. The case of the provinces of Biella and Vercelli
87-109Views:207This contribution is part of the tradition of heritage languages and linguistic and cultural identity. It mainly deals with the perception of the identity of students of non-Italian nationality or origin and their relationship with the language and the culture of origin, and those of the host community. More and more children and young people of non-Italian origin are present in Italian schools: the integration model pursued in Italy wants to respect cultural differences and language is one of the key elements of this process. The research concerned two provinces of Eastern Piedmont: Biella and Vercelli. Using a sociolinguistic and sociologic approach, a study was carried out through the administration of questionnaires concerning language and identity, the motivation towards integration, the perception and attitude towards one’s own language/culture of origin, and the Italian language/culture. The emerging picture presents sometimes ambiguous attitudes that can be defined almost as a “suspension” between the desire for “Italianisation” and the preservation of one’s roots. The research poses stringent questions schools and society are called to address on the construction (or reconstruction) of their own identity.
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“I can't write English, not even Italian... give me any 'giobba'": the Italian emigrants in the theater of Nino Randazzo
56-68Views:163The paper examines the cultural, social and linguistic representation of Italians emigrated to Australia in the writing for the theatre of Nino Randazzo, a playwright of Aeolian origin, who emigrated to Melbourne in 1952, considered one of the most important and prolific authors in the context of the so-called “letteratura dell’emigrazione”, and more particularly the Italian-Australian literature in italian language. Of particular interest is the theme of cultural and social prejudices of Anglo-Australians towards people of Italian origin, labelled as ignorant, impossible to acculturate and to discipline, largely linked to criminal organizations, which mostly speak a mixed variety of Italian and English. Thus, in particular, in the comedy Il Sindaco d’Australia (1981), in which the stereotypical (but hilarious) image of the emigrant from the south of Italy, impulsive and ambitious, characterized on a linguistic level by the use of Italian-Australian terms; and in the comedy Victoria Market (1982), conceived by Randazzo as a protest against the tendency on the part of Anglo-Australians to build stereotypes towards Italian-Australians, in this case the one that Italian equals mafioso. Randazzo’s theatre, however, manages to distinguish itself from the works of the majority of first-generation Italian-Australian playwrights for its attempt to demystify such prejudices and clichés in an enjoyable way. It is in the choice of a popular tone of comedy, also achieved through the skilful mixing of more traditional Italian forms with Italian-Australian terms typical of the years in which the narrated events are set, that the specific aspects in this author lay.
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Pepe-Lamartine A literary controversy and a duel for the Risorgimento
64-79Views:235The 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. -
The evolution of referential and predicational strategies in parliamentary debates on Italian immigration laws
Views:139This article presents the evolution of the use of two words in parliamentary debates, immigrato and extracomunitario, frequently used in Italian language in reference to a foreign person entering the country with the aim of staying. The corpus consists of the transcripted texts of the parliamentary debates related to eight laws on immigration between 1986 and 2019, analysed with both quantitative and qualitative methods. Collocations and co-occurences with verbs and adjectives are taken into consideration, as well as figurative language.
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Forms of poetry
Views:118Text analysis is a wide, and rich, field for research. The formal linguistic analysis of texts is not widespread, certainly not in Italy, but can profitably help in reading and interpreting. This can easily be seen with poetry. In this article I introduce some foundations of this approach and show how they apply to two poems in order to present some of its benefits.
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The waves of languages between emigration and immigration: the Italian case
160-176Views:36The 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.
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Success and Translation of Italian Literature in Hungary
20-35Views:241Literary 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
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Why read the French classics: Calvino and the lesson of the French masters
119-131Views:61Calvino’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.