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• Italy between history and historiography. In search of national identity

  62-76

  Marco Trotta

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  24

  Starting 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.

• Apollinaire and Ungaretti: towards the "fall" of modernity

  96-118

  Laura Giurdanella

  Views:

  189

  The relationship of esteem and affinity between Apollinaire and Ungaretti involves both biographical and literary levels. While critics have plentifully probed the direct biographical relationships – starting with the encounter of the poets in 1913 – and followed the progress of their friendship during the years of the First World War, the indirect contacts, i.e. those prior to Ungaretti’s arrival in Paris in 1912, would still seem unexplored. Moreover, over the years, various thematic connections have also been proposed; however, certain other thematic and textual tangencies could still reserve new and profitable insights into their hermeneutic key to modernity.

• Between description and re-enactment: fantasies of a return to the South in the short stories of Giovanni Verga

  Laura Lupo

  Views:

  207

  In his works, Giovanni Verga does not depict Sicily through an accurate description of reality, but through a mental representation of the same from the distant city of Milan, where he lives. Beyond the borders of Sicily, modernity devours characters, whose destiny is not described by Verga. He is the only one allowed to move in this space “di là del mare” (lit.“beyond the sea”), from which he observes “dall’altro lato del cannocchiale” (lit. “as from the other side of the telescope”) the “larve” (lit. larvae) that live in the island. The purpose of this article is to show how Fantasticheria, I dintorni di Milano, Di là del mare, and Passato! have as a common ground a process of recreation of Sicily as a place linked to a past that is never coming back, so the island is described from an idealized and nostalgic perspective. Modernity is indeed a condition as irreversible as death, which, in Passato!, appears as a ruthless conclusion of this process of reconstruction.