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

  64-79

  Gabriele Paolini

  Views:

  245

  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.

• The link between space and the individual in Petrarch and Leopardi

  38-45

  Julia Dabasi

  Views:

  190

  The interdisciplinary approach in history makes it possible to widen researchers’ perspectives. Italian literature is one medium in which we can reflect the relationship between geography, identity and imagination. John Agnew’s idea that ‘Place is a meaningful site that combines location, locale and sense of place’ conveys the main aspect of a ‘meaningful location’ and gives us a framework within which we can rethink space and place through Italian literature.1 In my research, I intend to examine the connections between identity and landscape, how experiences form the view of the environment through Giacomo Leopardi’s Infinity (1819) and Francis Petrarch’s letter of 26, April, 1336 in which he describes a vision about his ascent up Mount Ventoux. My main aim is to present how the impressiveness of nature becomes visible through the experiences of Leopardi and Petrarch, which is part of their existence. The mountain and the sea are key elements of these texts. The two places chosen and described by the poets have different significance: while Petrarch considered that the Mount Ventoux is the place of spiritual fulfilment, for Leopardi the hill of Recanati meant an isolated place where he could let his imagination roam free. All in all, this research offers new perspective to discover relationship between Italian literature and other disciplines in order to answer other, complex theoretical questions. I examined the topic from an interdisciplinary view to highlight the ways in which history, geography and literature can be linked.