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Ondina and the ondine: Representation issues (verbal and iconographic) of the sporty woman in fascist Italy (ca. 1933)
140-160Views:579In 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.
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Notes on László Gáldi's (Italian) stylistics
108-121Views:129The paper deals with László Gáldi’s Introduction to Italian Stylistics (1971), placing it in the coeval context of the methodological discussions between stylistics and structuralism in the 60s and 70s, as well as in the history of the Italian stylistics in the 20th century.
It investigates the theoretical sources of Gáldi’s book, which was influenced by different reference points: the European Romance philology, the Russian literary theory (mainly Viktor Žirmunskij’s approach to stylistics) and the Rumanian aesthetics and literary criticism.
Moreover, it shows the connection between the Introduction and Gáldi’s previous works, particularly the important book on the poetical style of Mihai Eminescu (1964), maybe Gáldi’s most relevant stylistic study, and other significant works of the same period (an interesting stylistic analysis of Musset’ Stances and a historical study of Rumanian versification).
In doing so, it shows the rich methodological and theoretical sources of Gáldi’s Introduction and the peculiar position of the Hungarian scholar in the history of European stylistics.
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Goliarda Sapienza atypical "militant journalist"
198-214Views:263This paper retraces Goliarda Sapienza’s no-fiction production between 1981 and 1988, considering in particular two feminist reviews of that period such as «Quotidiano Donna» and «Minerva: l’altra metà dell’informazione» on which she wrote articles about society, most of them never considered before today. Excluding the topic of the prison in her most important novels L’università di Rebibbia (1983) and Le certezze del dubbio (1987), the 80s could be defined as a moment of experience inside and beyond the Italian political context. Her reflections on Feminism authorize an interpretation of her “anomalous” way of thinking. At the end, the need to belong to a group will also open the following season.
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Italy between history and historiography. In search of national identity
62-76Views:65Starting 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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Hungarian POWs in Padula during the First World War
Views:302The 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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Translations belles infidèles. Comments to those of Domenico Tempio's oily compositions
161-182Views:407Belles 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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Scrivere e descrivere: La pervasività dell’ekphrasis nella poesia di Edoardo Sanguineti
Views:248This 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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Monicelli and the memory of the Great War
125-139Views:636In my essay, I examine Mario Monicelli’s La Grande Guerra, in order to verify if its comic and anti-heroic perspective really leads to a new concept of WWI. I first retrace the director’s previous filmography, where the characters, genres and patterns which will recur in La Grande Guerra originally take shape. I then reconstruct the movie’s genesis, focusing on the sources the screenwriters refer to: not only WWI movies and memories, such as Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and Lussu’s Un anno sull’Altipiano, but also, quite unexpectedly, La vita militare by De Amicis.
On this basis, I analyse the representation of the war, in its figurative and narrative elements. In many senses, it’s a war seen from the ground, and indeed the scenography and script take inspiration from the soldiers’ pictures of the front and their military songs. In this realistic context, Monicelli develops the plot of two cowardly privates, from a poor, undisciplined background, who ultimately identify with their nation enough to sacrifice themselves for their compatriots.
The purpose of highlighting the unacknowledged war contribution of the mass, however, is somehow contradicted by the army’s image. The comic and anti-heroic aspects, indeed, concern only the low-ranked soldiers, while the Command is represented in a sentimental way. In this respect, Monicelli confirms a rhetoric coming from De Amicis, and later inherited by Fascism: the army as an image of a model society, where North and South, rich and poor, educated and illiterate unite, and where everyone deserves his hierarchical rank.